11 100 2176 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A broad-ranging discussion of Gower's notions of gentilesse, rich both in detail and in implication that resist brief summary. Gentilesse is treated in Book 4 under the rubric of "Idleness," the last of the five branches of Sloth. Olsson analyzes Genius' discussion in three parts, corresponding to three different medieval senses of otium: "idleness" proper, for which Genius offers the questionable remedy of "busyness in love"; "recreation," the rest that allows a person to return to work (the treatment of chivalry and gentilesse); and "leisure," the condition necessary for profitable study (the lists of discoverers and inventors). The middle section adopts the courtly mode of the demande to match its courtly subject. Genius typically argues more than one side of the issue, but he finally creates a hierarchy of worth of the various kinds of gentilesse, ranging from "sotie of love," to the practice to chivalry, to "honeste love," to "vertu moral," which embraces all of the other virtues commended in the poem. While this discussion has both a centrality and a thematic importance that correspond to Virgil's comments on love in Purg. 17-18, it does not bring about any immediate change in either Amans or Genius. Amans remains the captive of his hope and his imagination, which reason is unable to impress or alter, and thus follows the example of Pygmaleon. Genius' imagination is of a different sort: like Ulysses, who in Gower's portrayal is unable to hold to one purpose for very long, he is quick to generate images, but also quick to forget them, and unable to forge any resolution from the many conflicting ideas that he speaks for. Olsson's comments here are an important contribution to the discussion of Gower's characterization of Genius and of Genius' "dual role," serving either Venus or God according to the demands of the moment. In Book 4, Genius remains torn between his two masters and their different notions of gentilesse. The priest of Venus gives us to stone-turned-to-flesh of Pygmaleon's statue and the flesh-turned-to-stone of Araxarathen as the "type" and "antitype" of the beloved, each a projection of self-serving male desire. The priest of God understands the gentilesse of Amans' own mistress and corrects his misapprehension of her, and in Book 5, he offers an "antitype" in his own characterization of his mistress Venus. Genius himself is a personified "demande," Olsson concludes; in speaking for conflicting values, he makes CA as a whole a form of "recreation" like the discussion of gentilesse, and forces our participation in the creation of a resolution. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 225-73. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Aspects of Gentilesse is John Gower's Confessio Amantis, Books III-V Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Braeger estimates that in New College MS 266 there were originally at least 32 illuminations (13 of which have been lost). With some acknowledgment of the difficulties created by our lack of knowledge of the types of models that were available to the artist, Braeger claims that taken together, these illustrations guide the reader to a particular way of interpreting the poem. The emphasis, in the choice of which tales to illustrate, is on what he calls "conversion narratives," in which the protagonist is brought to self-discovery and from vice to virtue; within these tales, the event that is illustrated is typically the encounter or discovery that provides "the initial moment of the protagonist's moral insight, the beginning of conversion" (p. 280). The other illustrations also "often feature moments of self- examination and insight similar to those of the conversion narratives" (p. 290). This emphasis draws attention, of course, to the analogy of Amans' "conversion" as a result of his encounter with Genius, which is also illustrated in the MS. It also provides a model for the reader's encounter with the poem and the "conversion" from vice to virtue that it offers. [PN. Copyright The New Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Braeger, Peter C. Published Braeger, Peter C.. "The Illustrations in New College MS. 266 for Gower's Conversion Tales." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 275-310. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Illustrations in New College MS. 266 for Gower's Conversion Tales Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review After discussing the availability of models, the problems created by page layout, and the very circumstances of MS production, Eberle presents convincing evidence that the miniatures in the Morgan MS were devised as a coherent program and that they reveal an interest in specific features of Gower's poem. The MS originally contained 110 illustrations, 108 of which survive. The placement and size of the miniatures in Book 7 (about half of the total) reflect the designer's concern for the hierarchical division of the text that corresponds to Gower's own concern for ordinatio. The illustrations of the tales reveal the designer's eye for content. In cases where two miniatures are found on the same page, he has chosen images that are either parallel or contrastive in some way, reinforcing the effects of the juxtaposition of the tales; some evidence of the same concern for parallelism can be found among widely separated tales. And in her detailed examination of the background and setting in some selected miniatures, Eberle discovers "an impulse to add interpretive detail" (p. 339), and offers revealing comments on how the painter responded to the designer's instructions. In her notes she hints at other patterns in the choice of which episode to illustrate. The evidence she presents for "the existence of an intelligent reading" behind these illuminations (p. 342) is compelling, and makes us look forward to hearing more. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in A Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis [Pierpont Morgan MS M.126]." In John Gower: Recent Readings. Papers Presented at the Meetings of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, 1983-88. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. Studies in Medieval Culture (26). Kalamazoo, MI: Western Michigan University, 1989, pp. 311-64. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Miniatures as Evidence of Reading in A Manuscript of the Confessio Amantis [Pierpont Morgan MS M.126] Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Presents a computer-aided analysis of the number, the form, and the usage of speech acts (commands, promises, and requests) in selected passages from Chaucer and Gower. He uses as the basis for his study all of the tales in "Confessio Amantis," "The Canterbury Tales," and the "Legend of Good Women" that Chaucer and Gower tell in common, plus the tales of Cleopatra and Hypermnestra in LGW, "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Canace and Machaire" from CA, the prologue to LGW, and both the prologue and epilogue to CA. The differences in the distribution of the various types of speech act in the two authors are not statistically significant. Green finds, however, that Gower has a marked preference for performative verbs, and Chaucer a significantly greater number of imperatives; and that in Gower, the proportion of reported utterance to direct address is far higher than it is in Chaucer's writing. In examining the authors' use of these passages, Green focuses on the moments in which the speech act is of particular moral significance: instances of deception, the responses of female characters to danger or to a challenge, and the characters' apostrophes. Chaucer's preference for direct address is especially marked in his characters' attempts to deceive one another, but he frequently allows his narrator to draw attention to the deception. Gower's narrator inserts himself less often, but Gower is more likely to include the responses of other characters in order to explore the effects of guile. In reporting a woman's reaction to her plight, Chaucer makes heavy use of the imperative mood, while Gower depends more on performative verbs and other expressive devices. In reporting soliloquies, Gower tends to place the performative verb in the introduction to the speech, while Chaucer includes it within the speech itself; Gower's soliloquies thus tend toward portraiture, while Chaucer's tend more to depict the character in action. In sum, Gower's art is designed to encourage moral reflection, while Chaucer's reflects a commitment to his own art: "Gower invites his readers to contemplate the morality of antiquity as vital to them; Chaucer's art supposes that moral passions expressed by women of the past can find convincing expression in fourteenth-century England" (pp. 184-85). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Green, Eugene Published Green, Eugene. "Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower." In Literary Computing and Literary Criticism: Theoretical and Practical Essays on Theme and Rhetoric. Ed. Porter, Rosanne G.. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989, pp. 167-187. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Speech Acts and the Art of the Exemplum in the Poetry of Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Pennsylvania Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the section on "Sources and Backgrounds," the editors include Olson's translation of MO 20833-92 and 20953-21060, which "contain the closest parallels to Chaucer's portrait of the Monk" (pp. 267-69 and n.), and Gower's tale of Florent (CA 1.1396-1871), with lexical notes, as an analogue of WBT (pp. 359-69). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 8.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson, eds. Published Kolve, V. A., and Glending Olson, eds. "The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer. Norton Critical Edition." New York: Norton, 1989 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Canterbury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue by Geoffrey Chaucer. Norton Critical Edition. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Norton, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower's name is cited frequently in this volume, the contributors to which provide a detailed and comprehensive survey of what is known about the many facets of manuscript production during the important time when Gower's and Chaucer's works first circulated. Among the more significant references: Kathleen Scott (in her essay on "Design, decoration, and illustration," pp. 31-64) discusses the illuminated MSS of CA in relation to other contemporary works (p. 33). Gower and Lydgate are the "two most illustrated of contemporary writers" (p. 39). The most common format in their works was the "column" miniature, which she illustrates with a reproduction of a page from Egerton 1991 (p. 36). Kate Harris ("Patrons, buyers and owners: the evidence for ownership, and the role of book owners in book production and the book trade," pp. 163-200) uses coats of arms as sure evidence of the commissioning of MSS, and cites four copies of CA in which the arms of the original owners are wholly or partially preserved (p. 168). She also cites another copy of CA in her discussion of the difficulty of using later ownership as evidence of provenance (p. 170). Carol M. Meale ("Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status," pp. 201-38) describes a previously unknown record of a charge brought in 1413 against a London stationer for removing nine books from the library of the late King Henry IV with the connivance of his "custodem librorum," and for retaining them "ad magnam decepcionem" of Henry V. Among the books mentioned is "unum alium librum vocat [sic] Gower." The document is important for the apparent reference to a palace "librarian" at so early a date, as Meale points out, but also because this is the first record we have of any direct connection between Henry V and a MS of Gower. The language of the MS is not specified, but Meale rather boldly identifies it "in all likelihood" as the Huntington Library copy of CA (p. 203). And A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall ("The Manuscripts of the Major English Poetic Texts," pp. 257-78) repeatedly cite what has been learned from the examination of individual MSS of Gower's works, in the chapter that has most to do with the cirumstances in which these copies were produced. CA is one of the works they believe was already being disseminated in some organized way before the end of the fourteenth century, "apparently under the author's supervision" (p. 258); the basis for their claim is not clear since there are no surviving copies from that period. They later attribute the consistency of format and the fineness of presentation of so many fifteenth-century copies of CA (in contrast, for instance, to the MSS of CrT and PP) to the availability of carefully prepared exemplars, rather than to the mode of production as some have supposed, and they endorse Doyle and Parkes' view (1978) of a largely "bespoke" trade, loosely organized by stationers and booksellers in reponse to particular orders from customers (pp. 260-61).] [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. Published Griffiths, Jeremy, and Derek Pearsall, eds. "Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 ISBN 0521257360 Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Examining the frame as a permeable boundary between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of a work of art, this study presents the frame as a strategic locus of value in the literary text, arguing that the frame both constitutes and is constituted by an interplay between stylistic 'insides' and ideological 'outsides'. Part One examines theoretical models and historical instances of framing manipulation. The first chapter considers the concept of framing as a theoretical tool for the interpretation of literature, and Chapter Two aligns ideological framing in the metaphorics of the medieval 'Book of Culture' with literal acts of framing in the arts by way of an account of framing in medieval drama, illuminated manuscripts, and the cornice of the traditional frame-tale. Chapter Three pursues the latter subject in more detail, and culminates in readings of framed works by Boccaccio, Gower, and Chaucer. Part Two of the study turns its attention to literal and political elements of framing in the commodified book: Chapter Four explores links between text and economies of value in the novel and in film, while Chapter Five focuses specifically on entitlement in the novel and on the framing possibilities of narrative voice. The final chapter traces ideological resonances of literary framing and frame-breaking in the explicitly political context of recent South African fiction." Author/Editor Author/Editor Macaskill, Brian Kenneth.  Published Macaskill, Brian Kenneth. Framing Value in Literature: Style and Ideology. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Washington, 1989. Dissertation Abstracts International A50.08. Abstract available via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Framing Value in Literature: Style and Ideology. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yoshimuri, who has previously studied the color expressions in T&C and PP, here catalogues every reference to color in CA, and discusses Gower's use of color words, contrasting Gower's usage to Chaucer's in CT. His essay is divided into several sections, discussing in turn the frequency of color words (divided between chromatic and achromatic), "descriptive color expressions" (such as "the colour of the reyni Mone"), contrastive color expressions, repetitive color expressions ("rody and red"), color similes, the use of color symbolism, and the special case of "derk" and "liht." The results are not entirely predictable, and there is some interesting insight on almost every page, either on the contrast between Chaucer's and Gower's practice (Chaucer, not surprisingly, had a far larger vocabulary for color than Gower did, and also used far more figurative expressions; Gower's favorite color word was "green," while Chaucer's was "white"), on the limitations imposed by Middle English (and the evident lack of a word for either "pink" or "orange," for example), or on the semantic field of ordinary color expressions, including the words they are ordinarily used to modify and their metaphorical suggestiveness. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yoshimuri, Koji Published Yoshimuri, Koji. "Color Expressions in Gower's Confessio Amantis." The Review of Inquiry and Research (Kansai University of Foreign Studies, Osaka, Japan) 50 (1989), pp. 13-35. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Color Expressions in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1989-07. Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Ovid, Livy, and Chaucer are the most frequently mentioned sources for Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece," and only two details in his poem have been traced to Gower's version in CA. Hillman finds a number of other detailed recollections of Gower's text, but finds even more compelling similarities in the general handling of two key scenes, the rape itself and Lucrece's suicide, and in the treatment of the two main characters. Both Shakespeare and Gower develop the contrast between Lucrece's innocence and the villain's guile on the evening of the rape, a scene neglected in the other sources, and give more than usual attention to the villain's motivation and state of mind. Both also treat Lucrece with greater sympathy and dignity than the other authors, and raise her to a genuinely tragic stature. Gower's version is "more engagingly human, more complex, and more powerful" than the other versions Shakespeare knew, and contributes more to our understanding of both the moral and the dramatic emphases of Shakespeare's poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hillman, Richard Published Hillman, Richard. "Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece." Chaucer Review 24 (1990), pp. 263-70. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Olsen's book is an attempt to apply modern linguistic and structuralist techniques to the study of CA in order to heighten the modern reader's appreciation for Gower's "literary artistry." Each chapter takes a different approach to the work, and Olsen makes only a modest effort to link them. In chapter 1, "Reading the Confessio Amantis: The Analogue of Dante's Vita Nuova," she uses VN in an attempt to define the genre of Gower's poem. Both works use both the vernacular and Latin, and both prose and verse; each uses a similar comic protagonist, who must be distinguished from the author; each is about love; each uses an encounter with the god of love to explore the nature of religious love; each refers in some way to the "Book of Memory," etc. In each case, the similarity helps explain what modern readers might find peculiar about Gower's poem. Chapter 2, "The Grammar of the Confessio Amantis," uses "grammar" in the Todorovian sense, but instead of examining the structure of individual tales, Olsen discusses the CA as a whole, and investigates the uses of various sorts of "juncture" (the Latin epigrams, and the change from one speaker to another) to create "narremes" in the poem, taking most of her examples from Books 7 and 8. Chapter 3, "Puns and the Language of Poetry in the Confessio Amantis," is an expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in In Geardagum 7 (1986), 17-36 (see JGN 6, no. 2). A pun links two different meanings (one of which may be suggested by only a similarity rather than an identicality of form), each of which is somehow appropriate to the context. When the juxtaposition is unexpected the result is often merely humorous, but in the more meaningful examples, the fact of linkage (which might draw attention to contrast as well as similarity) is itself significant, and the very equation of the two meanings it itself meaningful to the poem. Chapter 4, "Linguistics and Literary Structure: Metonymy and the Confessio Amantis," extends the discussion to rhyming puns, "rime équivoque," or as it is more usually called, "rime riche." Olsen considers several different types of "rime équivoque," concentrating on "Apollonius of Tyre." Where others might see merely a play on the inherent paradoxes of language or a way of creating rhetorical effect or parallelism, Olsen emphasizes a semantic equivalence between the rhyming words that alludes to thematic associations created by the narrative itself. Chapter 5, "Type-Scenes and the Structure of Narrative: The Sea Voyages in the Tale of Appolinus," is a revised version of the paper first published in the 1987 festschrift for Milman Parry (see JGN 7, no. 2). Olsen shows how Gower adopted a paradigm that descends ultimately from Anglo-Saxon oral poetry in describing the eleven separate voyages of Apollonius, and how he inverts the usual pattern in the voyages of Thaise and Taliart. In chapter 6, "'Of Storial Thyng': The Relationship of the Tales of Gower and Chaucer Reconsidered," she dismisses the biographical speculation that marks so much of the discussion of the relation between the two poets. She discusses instead how they shared the same "metalinguistic consciousness," and how the works of each provide a context for the other, using as her examples their "pliant" treatment of heroines borrowed from classical writers. Where their artistry differs, she concludes, "it is basically a matter of taste" which poet's works one prefers (p. 98). This is obviously a difficult book to summarize, and also to assess. Though any effort to update the criticism of Gower is salutary, the application of critical techniques can also be performed mechanically, sometimes at the expense of a close reading of the text. In chapter 1, for instance, not everyone will be persuaded that the long list of similarities between CA and VN constitute the definition of a "genre." Nor will everyone accept all of the conclusions that Olsen reaches, for instance that the (very different) mixture of languages and forms in VN "reminds us that we need to read the Latin commentary in the Confessio as part of the work" (p. 7; compare the essay by Derek Pearsall, below) or that the comparison to VN really solves the problems posed by Gower's Prologue and Book 7. Similarly, Olsen's identification of the "narremes" in Book 8, while leading to interesting remarks on the relation between Apollonius and Amans, also leads her to dismiss the closing prayer as a "marginal incident" (p. 22); how many readers have insisted on the basis of content that it is central instead? Her discussions of theory are not always as helpful as they might be. In chapter 4, for instance, she establishes a linkage between the "conventional" and the "metonymic" and between the "rhetorical" and the "metaphorical" that is confusing if not completely arbitrary, to this reader at least. It doesn't help that many of the examples of "rime équivoque" that she discusses as "metonymic" are meaningful only because they reinforce a metaphorical sense of one of the words involved. Some of her insights (e.g. her observation that the virtues in Book 7 derive more from a courtly than from a theological tradition, pp. 28-31), are not dependent upon the method she is following, and others, such as her comparison of the denunciation of Venus and the problems posed by VN, chapter 25 (p. 10), are submerged among a mass of much less interesting observations. Whatever its limitations, there is much that is worth considering in this volume. It is also worth pointing out that this is the first book-length critical study of Gower by a single author to appear since 1978, and only the fourth such study devoted to the Confessio Amantis alone, ever. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 9.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey Published Olsen, Alexandra Hennessey. ""Betwene Ernest and Game": The Literary Artistry of the Confessio Amantis." American University Studies, Series IV: English Language and Literature, 110 . New York: Peter Lang, 1990 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Betwene Ernest and Game": The Literary Artistry of the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Peter Lang, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Santano Moreno's study of the Spanish translation of CA (a revised version of his doctoral thesis of 1989) appeared in the same year as Alvar's edition of the text; the author records the appearance of the edition in a note on page 45, inserted after his book had already gone to press. Manuel Alvar's long introduction to that edition and the present book thus constitute two independent, and in some respects complementary, studies of the same material. Santano Moreno's book is divided into seven chapters. The first treats the dating of the Portuguese and Spanish translations, and presents in greater detail the same evidence that appears in the author's essays (nearly identical, and both in English) in Manuscripta 35 (1991):23-34 (see JGN 10, no. 2) and in Selim 1 (1991):106-22 (see JGN 13, no. 1). His conclusions, that the Portuguese translation was completed between 1433 and 1438, that the Spanish translation was done before 1454, and that the surviving MS must be dated after 1487 and perhaps as late as the early years of the 16th century, are argued persuasively, they constitute a significant revision of previously held views, and they are the final word until some better evidence is found. The remaining six chapters are devoted to the differences between the Spanish and English texts, arranged by type: two chapters on "Omissions that do not substantially modify the meaning," and one each on "Omissions that modify the meaning, and censorship of an ethical and religious nature," "Additions and transformations," "Additions that modify the meaning for ethical or religious reasons," and "Idiomatic and cultural correspondences" between the two texts. The division between changes that affect the sense and those that don't appears somewhat arbitrary: it is a bit surpris¬ing, for instance, to find the omission of the Latin epigrams included in the first chapter, among differences that "do not substantially modify the meaning." (In this section, the author might also have considered the state of the English MS from which the original translator worked, moreover, as Alvar does in his treatment of the epigrams, and as Santano himself does is his discussion of the accidental omission of 4.1813-2233.) The chapter headings are thus somewhat misleading; what we really have here is a catalog of differences between the Spanish and English texts that affect the sense in different ways. As such, Santano Moreno's study provides the complement to Alvar's: where Alvar studies equivalencies, Santano emphasizes differences; where Alvar emphasizes translation, Santano treats the Spanish version as a re-creation of the English text, citing other instances in which medieval authors altered the stories that they found in their "sources." The analogy between Gower's retelling of Ovid, say, and Juan de Cuenca's version of CA is perhaps not exact, but the author finds enough differences to make his comparison interesting. The very act of translating Gower's verse into prose results in many of the omissions that Santano lists, for the Spanish text leaves out most of the expressions we ordinarily dismiss as "fillers" for the sake of meter or rhyme. Another consequence, however, is that the Spanish version is much less colloquial than Gower's; most of the examples that Santano cites in this respect come from the dialogue portions of the poem, and reflect some of the differences from the more formal style of most of the tales. The Spanish version is also less ornamental rhetorically, and here we might consider whether style is a part of meaning: one gets little sense from the Spanish of Gower's more stirring passages of description, or of Amans' more assertive and emotional defenses of his love. The translator was also evidently less interested in the psychology of the lover than in questions of morality. He is rather more modest than Gower in his references to sexual desire, and to complement his many small omissions, he has made a number of additions as well, sometimes only of a single word, but emphasizing such things as God's grace, God's will, God's intervention in human affairs, the sacraments, conversion, the doctrines of the church, the need for penitence, and the destiny that awaits the unrepentant sinner, and generally heightening the praise of virtue and the condemnation of vice. Santano Moreno also notes, as evidence of the translators' own learning, some passages in which they have corrected Gower's citations from the Bible and restored his story to a form more like the source; and in his last chapter, on "idiomatic and cultural correspondences," he treats some of the differences in behavior and imagery that reflect that translators' adaptation for a different nation of readers. His general conclusion, however, is that despite all the differences between the texts, in emphasizing the moral instruction in the poem the translators have remained consistent with Gower's own purposes. Santano Moreno's own characterization of Gower as a sober moralist seems to lie behind some of his judgments of which changes alter the sense and which do not. Some will feel, however, that he has been too conservative, and that in out-Gowering Gower, the translators have removed much of what makes CA more interesting than a mere work of moral instruction could possibly be. Both this book and Alvar's edition will be nearly impossible to obtain in the United States. Readers who wish a copy of Santano Moreno's may write to the Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Extremadura; C/ Pizarro, 8; 10071 Cáceres; Spain. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Estudio sobre Confessio Amantis de John Gower y su versión Castellana, Confisyon del Amante de Juan de Cuenca." Cáceres: Universidad de Extremadura, 1990 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Estudio sobre Confessio Amantis de John Gower y su versión Castellana, Confisyon del Amante de Juan de Cuenca. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Universidad de Extremadura, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Iwasaki considers constructions such as the following one, chosen almost at random from among the many examples that he cites: "Bot al the Marche of thoccident / Governeth under his empire, / As he that was hol lord and Sire CA Prol. 720-22). Iwasaki provides a table showing the number of examples of each of the different variations on this structure (that/which/the which; different antecedent pronouns) in both Chaucer and Gower, and discusses some of the constraints on choice among the different possibilities. Gower uses the structure more frequently than Chaucer. Only rarely does it suggest comparison ("like one that") or mean "in the capacity or role of one that" as one might expect from modern English; it is usually, as Macaulay suggests (English Works 1.469), and as the example cited illustrates, the equivalent of a modern English participial phrase ("being lord and Sire"), and most often implies a causal relation to the main clause. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Iwasaki, Haruo Published Iwasaki, Haruo. "The Expression 'as he which' in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Geibun-Kenkyu Journal of Arts and Letters 58 (1990), pp. 231-40. ISSN 0435-1630 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Expression 'as he which' in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A detailed comparison of Chaucer's ("Legend of Good Women"), Gower's ("Confessio Amantis"), and Ovid's ("Metamorphoses") versions of the story of Philomela, including lengthy excerpts from all three texts. Each differs in arrangement and emphasis. In the scope of the plot, Gower follows Ovid more closely than Chaucer does, though like Chaucer, his central theme is the falseness of men, and where Ovid focuses on the three characters equally, Gower focuses on the two female characters, and Chaucer focuses on Philomela alone. Gower imagines the place and situation of Procne's request to Tereus more fully than the other two, but says less about the site where the rape was committed. Like Chaucer, he introduces direct discourse in the report of Philomela's cries. He gives more attention than the other versions to Tereus' homecoming and to the false story of Philomela's death, and adds the long passage of her prayer. He also gives the longest account of Procne's receipt and reading of Philomela's weaving. He preserves more of the women's revenge than Chaucer does, and all of the metamorphoses which Chaucer omits. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oka, Saburo Published Oka, Saburo. "Chaucer's Transformation of 'The Legend of Philomela' in The Legend of Good Women." Thought Currents in English Literature (Aoyama Gakuin University) 63 (1990), pp. 79-109. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Transformation of 'The Legend of Philomela' in The Legend of Good Women Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Perhaps the most ambitious book on Gower ever written. In it, Yeager provides a wealth of insight into each of Gower's major works in his attempt to define Gower's "poetic," the assumptions about language and poetry that give coherency to his writing. His first chapter, "Stylistics," deals with the poet's attitudes towards language and his craft. Gower had a deep concern for language, Yeager asserts, citing as evidence his care for the correctness of his texts. And his comments on poetry, particularly in the opening lines of CA, reveal both a consciousness of style in relation to audience, and a strong sense of the poet's duty both to his country and to his language, echoing similar statements by Gower's admired models, Virgil and Ovid. Gower took both responsibilities quite seriously, and what appears most conventional about his verse -- his choice of English, his use of octosyllables, and the unvarying regularity of his meter and his rhyme -- Yeager attributes to his conscious attempt to create a poetic language that was adequate to his highest moral concerns. Yeager describes Gower's metrical practice in particular as a novelty and experiment, a conscious response to the metrical discord of his English predecessors and an attempt to set new standards for the language. The remainder of the chapter demonstrates that metrical regularity alone did not inhibit Gower in any important way. Yeager examines the poet's manipulation of pace and tone, his ability to create different "voices" for his two principals, and his use of alliteration, rhyme, and punning, illustrating at the same time both Gower's consciousness of language itself and his great skill in linking sound and sense. The second chapter, "Gower's Lines," extends the discussion of Gower's use of language to his relation with and attitude towards his predecessors, focusing on VC, MO, CB, and Traitié. The model for Gower's construction of his verse, Yeager maintains, is provided by his use of extracts from Latin authors in VC, following the example of the late classical cento. Giving the best available account of the manner in which VC was composed, Yeager rejects the notion of Gower as mere plagiarist, and describes him as an innovative experimenter with cento technique who consciously adopted the poetry of the classical past into a new context and for a different purpose. This technique of the cento is reflected in the "patchwork" construction of both MO and CA, and more importantly, in the self-conscious way in which Gower adopts borrowed language in each of his other poems. In MO, CB, and Traitié, the sources are not classical, but the French love poetry of Gower's immediate predecessors, particularly the Roman de la Rose. In the indelicacy of his language and the amorality of his presentation of love, Jean de Meun would have represented to Gower the abandonment of all of the moral responsibility that Gower felt was incumbent on the poet. His response was to adopt the vocabulary but to reject the ethos, and to turn the language of love poetry to higher ends. In MO, his strategy is reflected in the poem's structure: Yeager describes MO as an "anatomy of desire" set within "an envelope of amorous address," speaking to all lovers in the opening lines, but turning to the Virgin at the end, as the poet/narrator finally achieves his true calling (anticipating also Yeager's account of the structure of CA). In CB and Traitié, Gower's borrowing of the verse form and vocabulary of courtly poetry is more palpable, but his rejection of its values is all the more direct, as he "rehabilitates" the language of love in order to celebrate chaste marriage. Chapter three, "Transformations," focuses on Gower's adoption of narrative material in CA. Beginning with some of Gower's characteristic habits as a storyteller -- his use of "pointing," his rare use of visual imagery, and the ways in which he depicts a character's inner thought -- Yeager emphasizes both the deliberateness of effect and the "moral resonance" that Gower achieves with sometimes limited resources. He takes particular issue with C.S. Lewis, who found Gower little interested in his characters' mental processes, and points out how frequently and effectively Gower uses action to reveal cognition, especially in the case of Amans. Turning to broader issues in Gower's use of story material, Yeager classifies the exempla of CA into five different types according to the degree of transformation from the source and the positive or negative way in which the tale serves the announced moral lesson. He then gives a close reading of "Albinus and Rosemund" and "Tereus," illustrating how the poet, by his excisions and additions, has shaped the stories to the purposes of his frame, and how he has made them both psychologically and artistically more satisfying than the versions he found in his sources. In chapter four, "Exceptions Prove the Rule," Yeager confronts the portions of CA that have traditionally posed the greatest difficulties for readers: the discussion of Labor in Book 4; the lengthy account of the religions of the world in Book 5; the treatment of Sorcery in Book 6; the whole of Book 7; and the focus in Book 8 on the sin of incest. In each case, he attempts to show how these departures from the expected pattern of the confession conform to, and help define more clearly, Gower's overall plan for his poem. Yeager is at his best in explicating the poem in this chapter: his analyses of these sections and his explanations of their place in the context of CA as a whole are insightful and in large part original. Certain themes recur in his discussion: Gower's urgency to place his treatment of love in a broader moral context; his concern for the proper use of language, especially in poetry; his "adversarial rewriting" of the literature of the past, including, again, RR; and structurally, the anticipation in these sections of the poem's epilogue and conclusion. In the last chapter, "Arion's Final Song," Yeager strives to define precisely how Gower's plan for CA gave coherency to the diversity of materials that he assembled in his poem. The key, he argues, is to be found in the figure of Arion that Gower introduces at the end of his Prologue, the poet whose "lusti melodie" was capable of bringing peace and harmony to all creation and among all classes of men. Gower thought of himself as that Arion, Yeager maintains. The fictional story of the lover Amans is his "lusti melodie." It is also, however, the story of the narrator's growth in wisdom, and at the end, having rejected the foolishness of his love, this narrator "Amans/Gower," now bearing particular resemblance to the poet himself, offers his own prayer for peace in the epilogue, and also retells the story of his conversion in this poem so that we may follow his course and help bring about the harmony that he prays for. This course leads him by way of a redefinition of love, to include more than mere romantic passion, and also by way of a discussion of the roots of political harmony in Book 7. In each respect in which Gower has broadened the discussion of love, he has surpassed the ethical limits of the traditional love allegory even while imitating its form. CA is thus "a love poem designed to outgrow itself" (p. 265), and also another attempt to reform the language of the poetic tradition from which it springs. This summary can hardly do justice to the sophistication of Yeager's argument, or to the success with which he has woven together the diverse elements of CA into a whole and embraced Gower's different poems within a coherent vision. Portions of Yeager's analysis will already be familiar to readers of Fisher, Peck, et al., particularly his attempt to use Gower's social doctrine as the basis for the unity of Gower's work, but Yeager's discussion is richer, more detailed, and more sensitive to the complexity of Gower's verse than that of most of his predecessors. Yeager has provided a provocative new view of Gower as a poet, and because of his detailed familiarity with his subject and the sharpness of his eye, there is something of value on nearly every page, even for those who are not persuaded by his central thesis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion." Publications of the John Gower Society, 2 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Backgrounds and General Criticism Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Lowe cites Gower's comments on the war in CA 3 and VC 3 and 7 (pp. 175-77) in his discussion of fourteenth-century precedents for the humanist and post-Reformation critique of the notion of a "just war" and the advocacy of peace as most beneficial to the commonwealth. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 18.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lowe, Ben Published Lowe, Ben. "War and Commonwealth in Mid-Tudor England." Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1990), pp. 171-191. ISSN 0361-0160 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource War and Commonwealth in Mid-Tudor England. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The following three articles are Santano Moreno's partial publication (prologue and book I) of the "Confisyon del Amante," the Spanish translation of the CA. The editor introduces each article-edition with a brief note giving the most relevant information about the text and the main critical aspects addressed by critics about this version of the CA. The third piece also discusses some aspects of Elena Alvar's complete edition of the text, published in 1990. a) Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "El prólogo de Confisyon del amante de Juan de Cuenca, la traducción castellana de "Confessio amantis" de John Gower." Anuario de Estudios Filológicos 13 (1990): 363-78. http://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/58700.pdf. b) Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "El "libro I" de Confisyon del amante de Juan de Cuenca, la traducción castellana de "Confessio Amantis" de John Gower (I)." Anuario de estudios filológicos 14 (1991): 383-404. http://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/58732.pdf. c. Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "El "libro I" de Confisyon del Amante de Juan de Cuenca, la traducción castellana de Confessio Amantis de John Gower (II)." Anuario de Estudios Filológicos 15 (1992): 305-34. http://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/58767.pdf. [ASH. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 34.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Confisyon del amante." Anuario de Estudios Filológicos. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Confisyon del amante Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Anuario de Estudios Filológicos, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Other NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This new edition of the Spanish translation of CA is the first of two products of the recent flurry of interest in Gower's work among Spanish scholars. It fills an obvious and longstanding need. Gower was the first major English author to be translated into a contemporary vernacular, shortly after his death. The surviving Spanish translation, by Juan de Cuenca, is actually based on an earlier Portuguese translation by one Robert Payn which is no longer extant, and thus by the middle of the fifteenth century CA had already been made available in two languages other than the author's, an unexpected tribute to Gower's reputation and an interesting opportunity to examine how the work has endured the transformation. The only existing edition of the Spanish version, published by Adolf Birch-Hirschfeld (using a transcription begun by Hermann Knust) in 1909, is now nearly impossible to find, and even when it is available, it cannot be relied upon. R.W. Hamm estimated in 1975 that it contained at least 17,500 errors of transcription, and it appears that this calculation may even have been somewhat low. Alvar's work serves at very least to make the translation more widely available, and for that reason alone is to be welcomed. Alvar presents the text in what she calls a "paleographic edition." Following scrupulously the presentation in the manuscript, Alvar not only uses the conventional editorial devices (italics for expanded abbreviations, brackets for other letters supplied by the editor), but she also distinguishes typographically the two different forms of s, and indicates both the beginning of each new column and, with a slash and superscript, the beginning of each new line. (Where is Edmund Wilson?) The punctuation is also that of the MS. A bit confusingly, however, she has adopted modern capitalization, and she has also regularized the use of accents. What she has not done is to give any indication (apart from the running head identifying the book number) of the corresponding line numbers in the English text, making reference from one version to another extremely tedious. Notes (indicated by a superscript within parentheses, almost impossible to find quickly among all the superscripts recording the line numbers) record other observable features of the manuscript, some of the more obvious differences from Gower's text, and the more important differences from Birch-Hirschfeld. As the passage quoted illustrates, the translation entirely omits the Latin epigrams of the original, and incorporates the longer marginalia in shortened form into the text column, treating them as chapter headings. Alvar records in the notes each place in which an epigram or a gloss that appears in Macaulay's edition has been omitted, though Manuel Alvar argues in the introduction that these were probably already lacking in the English MS from which the Spanish translation ultimately derives. It is not to be expected that an edited text of such complexity should be entirely free of mistakes. Bernardo Santano Moreno, in his review of this edition in Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1992): 147-64, points out some inconsistencies in the editor's treatment of abbreviations, and he finds a small number of errors in the passages that he compared, evidently painstakingly, to the MS. In the entire Prologue, these amount to five errors of transcription, three failures to indicate an expanded abbreviation with italics, one failure to expand an abbreviation, one failure to correct an obvious scribal error, and one scribal mistake corrected without a note. If this rate of error is consistent through the entire work, the level of accuracy is still very high, and Santano Moreno rightly concludes that though this is not yet a definitive text, it is still an enormous improvement on Birch-Hirschfeld. Perhaps we can hope for an errata list at some time in the near future; evidently it would not be very long, and we should not have to wait for an entirely new edition. The text is preceded by a long, 137-page introduction by Manuel Alvar, treating a wide variety of topics concerning both Gower's work and the translation. The opening portions are the least original, and also the least trustworthy. In the account of Gower's life, we learn that Chaucer conducted him to Italy in 1378; and the date that is offered for the lost Portuguese translation, between 1399 and 1415, is exactly the period that is excluded by P.E. Russell, whom Alvar cites. (Both errors are also noted by Santano Moreno in his review.) The entire discussion of the dating of both Portuguese and Spanish translations is now superseded by the findings of Santano Moreno, presented most fully in his book (reviewed below). Alvar's dating of the MS, to 1454-1490, is not inconsistent with Santano Moreno's, though Santano Moreno would choose the end rather than the beginning of this period. Alvar's discussion of the English MS from which the translations derive is much more detailed than that of Macaulay, who knew the Spanish version only from short extracts. His conclusion, that the Portuguese translator had a copy of recension "one," is the same, but Alvar goes further in pointing out that the absence of the Latin lyrics and the abbreviation of the marginalia suggest a very late copy, perhaps resembling Bodleian Ashmole 35. The reviewer is not qualified to evaluate Alvar's treatment of the language of the translation; Santano Moreno judges it competent and helpful. Alvar's greatest interest, however, is in the art of the translator, and the longest part of his introduction is concerned with the relation between the Spanish and English versions. He sees the translator's task as the faithful reproduction of the text of his original, and he is led to some speculations on what exactly that might mean, at one point defining it as presenting the poem as Gower would have had he written it had he written in Spanish. But most of the discussion is concerned with the devices by which the translator achieves this goal, concluding that, except in the case of the most obvious errors, he has been successful in doing so. The passages that Alvar examines includes some in which the translator follows Gower very closely, some in which he has expanded the text, some which he has shortened, and some that he has simply altered in some way. All provide an opportunity for Alvar to discuss the confron¬tation between two languages and two cultures; and such things as the translator's attempts to make more explicit or concrete what is only implied in English, or to transfer a comparison into more familiar imagery, are treated by Alvar as different ways of creating equivalencies. He gives special attention to the difficulty of translating certain key terms, concluding, as always, with his praise of the translator's precision. The discussion is complicated, of course, by the existence of the lost intermediary Portuguese version, but Alvar is not hesitant to give full credit for the successfully realized translation to both translators. As an introduction to the relation between the Spanish and English texts, Alvar's discussion is well worth reading, but it should be used alongside the very different treatment (discussing many of the same passages) by Bernardo Santano Moreno, in entry #131. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Alvar, Elena, ed. Published Alvar, Elena, ed. "John Gower: Confesión del Amante. Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (S. XV). Edición Paleográfica." Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia Española (45). Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1990 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower: Confesión del Amante. Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (S. XV). Edición Paleográfica. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Real Academia Española, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Admitting that his endeavor "at first looks unpromising," Axton proceeds to consider ways in which Chaucer may have influenced Gower. His argument includes commentary on their common sources, especially Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and French poetry, as well as their mutual involvement in the "tangles of the law" (22), characterizing the poetic relationship of the two men as "mutual attraction and responsiveness" (23), considering their "rivalry" as well as their interdependencies. Axton observes that Chaucer preceded Gower in finding "an English voice" and in "cultivating a sophisticated attitude towards both his reader and his subject matter" (24), especially when writing about love. Specific bits of diction and imagery are found earlier in Chaucer than in Gower, Axton avers, and Chaucer's first-person pose as an "outsider" in love may have inspired Gower, particularly in CA, to create a "mild and complaining, deferential, courtly" voice, different from the more familiar "admonitory voice of moral authority" found in Gower's earlier poetry and returning in the voice of Venus in Book 8 of CA. While raising these suggestions, Axton comments at length on Chaucer's uses of and attitudes toward Gower, particularly those evident in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale and in Manciple's Tale--evidence of Gower influence on Chaucer, rather than the reverse which his title implies. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Axton, Richard Published Axton, Richard. "Gower--Chaucer's Heir?" In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ed. Morse, Ruth and Windeatt, Barry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 21-38. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower--Chaucer's Heir? Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A passage from CA provides one of three samples of non-Chaucerian English of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that Minkova uses to verify the consistency of the classic rule on preservation of final -e on monosyllabic adjectives in weak position that was formulated based on Chaucer. The other two texts are "The Bodley Version of Mandeville's Travels," ed. M.C. Seymour, and "Songs and Carols from a Manuscript in the British Museum of the Fifteenth Century," ed. Thomas Wright (British Library MS Sloane 2593), evidently in their entirety. The degree of conformity to the "rule" is about the same as has been reported for Chaucer, some 90% of possible instances or better. Minkova goes on to suggest that prosody rather than grammar provides the best explanation for the preservation of the final -e: citing the "Principle of Rhythmic Alternation," Minkova points out that the final unstressed syllable serves to separate two stressed syllables not only in the case of monosyllabic adjectives after an article but also in some of the other less easily categorizable instances in which it is found, e.g. in prepositional phrases such as Gower's "for pure dredde." The suggestion is interesting and plausible, but an argument based on prosody surely requires a comparison of the survival in verse and in prose. Minkova also makes no reference to the quality of our surviving texts; some of the studies of Chaucer that are cited are based on editions that were themselves regularized for meter, and the danger of a circular argument sneaks in here in the discussion of Gower: meter is used to verify the survival of -e in the passages that are listed, but then these passages are used to document the importance of the meter. There is, finally, a bit of confusion over the contents of CA. "My sample is taken from the Tale of Ulysses and Telegonus and The Tale of Nectanabus (the entire Liber Sextus of Confessio Amantis . . .)," Minkova states, evidently knowing the poem only from the extracts contained in Peck's edition. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minkova, Donka Published Minkova, Donka. "Adjectival Inflexion Relics and Speech Rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modern English." In Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 6-9 April 1987. Ed. Adamson, Sylvia. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990, pp. 313-338. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adjectival Inflexion Relics and Speech Rhythm in Late Middle and Early Modern English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Benjamins, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yeager summarizes here in compact form what little is known of Spenser's relationship with a poet not often included among his sources. Spenser himself never mentions Gower's name, and the evidence that he knew Gower's work is only circumstantial: at least three printed editions of Confession Amantis were available at the end of the sixteenth century, three surviving MSS are known to have been owned by Spenser's friends, and there are direct references to Gower by both Gabriel Harvey and "E.K." Yeager identifies several ways in which Gower might have provided a model for Spenser. Like Spenser, Gower was a poet of moral and of social reform; and CA resembles Faerie Queene both in conception, as a collection of moral exempla, and in execution, created by an imaginative reshaping of his sources. There are also a number of specific passages in FQ for which sources in Gower's writing have been suggested, mostly from CA, but also the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in FQ 1, which may be based on a passage in MO. In some cases Gower is the most likely source; in others Yeager points out that there are alternate or common sources in other works that Spenser is known to have used. The list of passages that he cites does not include the episode of Amavia and Mordant discussed by Arnold Sanders ("Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale"), whose essay should now be added to the bibliography with which Yeager's article concludes. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Gower, John." In The Spenser Encyclopedia. Ed. Hamilton, A. C., and others. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990, pp. 337-338. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, John Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Toronto Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Briefly noted. Includes none of Gower's Cinkante Balades "because of their late date (1399-1400) and their availability in the edition of George C. Macaulay" (p. 2, n. 3). Thomas L. Reed, Jr., Middle English Debate Poetry and the Aesthetics of Irresolution (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990) dismisses CA from consideration as a debate poem although it consists largely of dialogue. CA, "in spite of Gower's announced intention of keeping his audience refreshed and alert by finding a "middel weie" between "lust" and "lore," is so heavily moral and so dominated by the exampla [sic] of Genius that it might be classified as a dramatized sermon" (p. 307). Author/Editor Author/Editor Jeffrey, David L., and Brian J. Levy, eds. Published Jeffrey, David L., and Brian J. Levy, eds. "The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology Edited from the Manuscripts with Translations and Commentary." Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Anglo-Norman Lyric: An Anthology Edited from the Manuscripts with Translations and Commentary. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This thesis presents the results of an investigation of antifraternal materials produced in France during the thirteenth century and in England during the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Primary materials include theological tracts such as William of Saint Amour's 'De periculis novissimorum temporum' and 'De pharisaeo et publicano' and Richard FitzRalph's 'Defensio curatorum' and vernacular works such as several of Rutebeuf's 'dits,' Jean de Meun's continuation of 'The Romance of the Rose,' John Gower's 'Vox clamantis,' Chaucer's 'Summoner's Tale,' John Skelton's 'Collyn Clout,' Thomas More's 'Utopia,' John Heywood's 'The Pardonner and The Friar,' Robert Greene's 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' William Shakespeare's 'Measure for Measure,' and Thomas Fuller's 'Chaucer'. These materials collectively confirm that, during the late Middle Ages following FitzRalph's influential attack on friars, a particularly British body of antifraternal literature, distinct from its French progenitor, emerged. The distinctly British treatment of friars, marked by its emphasis on fraternal oratories and friars as peddlers, continued until the Reformation when it faded away as the friars themselves silently dissolved into the rapidly changing British religious landscape. Despite the appearance of antifraternal motifs and images in post-Reformation literature, this body of literature lacks a particularly British colouring." Brim's section on Gower's VC (pp.149-79) observes his interest in polemical issues rather than historical details. She focuses on his continuation of earlier motifs derived from his predecessors--with the exception of their emphasis on "apocalyptic trappings" (156)--and his particularly British critique of fraternal fixation with "ornate churches" (170) and "graven images" (171). Later in her discussion, Brim comments recurrently on resemblances between VC and later English antifraternal literature. [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Brim, Constance E. Published Brim, Constance E.  The Development and Decline of British Antifraternal Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation. McMaster University, 1990. x, [343] pp. Dissertation Abstracts International 53.01. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & ThesesGlobal and via https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/items/8dc547b3-dd54-45f0-a9e6-ffdf5c4524e6. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Development and Decline of British Antifraternal Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1990 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English works: in "In Praise of Peace," "Cinkante Balades," "Traitié pour essampler les amantz marietz," and the "supplicacioun" from CA, concluding that whereas Gower learned from Chaucer's explorations in rhyme royal, he contributed something special in Ricardian poetics though his unique experiments in French forms and in philosophical love poetry. [JGN 10.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88.3 (1991), pp. 251-75. Gower Subject In Praise of Peace Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The Latin verses are one of the least well known portions of Confessio Amantis, in large part because of the difficulties that they can pose; through the success of their translations, Echard and Fanger have also demonstrated the importance of these verses to the understanding of Gower's work. Their book presents all 70 Latin epigrams from CA as found in Macaulay's edition, with an facing-page English verse translation and notes on problems of interpretation and on the relation between the Latin verses and Gower's English text. The Preface by A.G. Rigg treats "Gower's Place in Anglo-Latin Literature" and his "Meter and Language." It is brief but well informed: the first part surveys English Latin writing of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and will be very useful to those who are more familiar with literature in English. His notes on the language are limited to what is idiosyncratic to Gower, but will be of help to anyone trying to deal with these verses on his or her own. The translators' introduction is concerned with the importance of what they refer to as the "machinery" of the poem, with the stylistic quality of the Latin verses, and with their relation to the English text. Their comments on the importance of word-play and ambiguity in the verses are an essential supplement to their translations. The value of the translations themselves is revealed by comparing them to the many less successful and occasionally inept attempts that have appeared in the published commentary on CA, which Echard and Fanger are gracious enough not to cite. This book is no mere crib, however: the translators have renounced mere prose translations in favor of their own verse renderings, which, though often strikingly successful both as translations and as poetry, raise some questions regarding the intended audience. The translators justify their choice in their introduction: through verse, they claim, they are better able to preserve the poetic effects, such as the functional ambiguity and paranomasia, of the original, and also to reflect the liveliness and merit of verse that is often thought of as dull. The second justification is certainly consistent with one of the expressed purposes of this book, which is to heighten appreciation of the poet. Prose has its advantages too, however, one being that it makes it easier to retrace the translators' steps back into the Latin, where the real interest of all serious readers must lie; and despite their claim, there are certainly adequate means in prose to describe if not to imitate the effects that they refer to. To give one example, which is not offered as typical, but which illustrates both some of the merits of this book and also the need to keep the Latin original close by, Echard and Fanger render the familiar opening epigram of Book 1 of CA in this way: "Created love to Nature's law subdues / This orb, and causes beasts to share one mind. / For love appears to rule this world as prince, / Whose help by all is needed, rich and poor. / In combat Love and Fortune equal are: / As snares for mankind both revolve blind wheels. / Sick health, vexed rest is love, a warlike peace, / A wound most sweet, fair ill, a pious fault." There is much to commend here, and line 6 in particular is probably the best that can be done with an awkward and difficult passage. A helpful note comments on Gower's "naturatus amor," easing whatever reservations there might be about "created love." Line 2, however, contains a problem: the original reads "et vnanimes concitat esse feras." Which is direct object and which is object complement is not clear. Others, such as Kurt Olsson (1992:27; see JGN 9.2) have taken it the other way around, reading "and incites everyone alike to be wild"; while Winthrop Wetherbee (1991:7; see JGN 11.1), sees a functional ambiguity. Atypically, Echard and Fanger provide no note, and one cannot be sure whether they rejected the alternate reading or simply did not consider it. And in the last two lines, they have silently altered the order of the designations of love, evidently for the sake of meter; in addition to making the translation less useful as a gloss, the translators have also altered the emphasis, however slightly. Some of their other translations are even freer, but the many inevitable quibbles over the most precise choice of word do not outweigh the service that Echard and Fanger have performed in making the most mysterious portion of the poem suddenly so much more accessible, and in so attractive a form. And while future commentators will probably want to work up their own translations, we will all still owe a debt to Echard and Fanger for confronting Gower's Latin verse as a whole and for the many solutions to particular difficulties that they offer. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 2.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Echard, Siân, trans., Fanger, Clare, trans. Published Echard, Siân, trans., and Fanger, Clare, trans.. "The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation." Medieval Texts and Studies, 7 . East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1991 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Latin Verses in the Confessio Amantis: An Annotated Translation. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Colleagues Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Part I of Archibald's book is a study of the sources and circulation of the Latin "Historia Apollonii" and its medieval and Renaissance retellings, including chapters on "Problems in the Plot" and "Genre, Reception and Popularity" in which she offers some comparative comments on the post-classical treatments of the story. Part II presents an edition of version "RA" of the "Historia," with an English translation and a selection of alternative readings from version "RB." There are also two long appendices: the first lists 43 surviving retellings of the Historia, both Latin and vernacular, in chronological order, with a selected bibliography and some comment on each, including, of course, both the Old English version and Gower's, and concluding with Shakespeare's "Pericles." The second presents 37 allusions to the story from other texts from the same period, including Chaucer's reference (probably to Gower's version) in Man of Law's Prologue. Archibald assembles a great deal of material here, and the principal value of her book will be to have gathered together so much in a single place. A large part of her discussion, particularly of the "Historia" itself, is based very heavily on the work of others, and most serious readers will want to depend less on Archibald and more on the earlier scholars whose works she catalogues in her notes. Similarly, the text of the "Historia" that she presents is of little independent value: it is a highly eclectic version, based heavily on the edition of Kortekaas but evidently freely revised, and without any textual notes whatever; there is no indication, moreover, of how the alternative readings from version "RB" were selected, or of how many were left out. Archibald's real interest is not the "Historia" itself but its later influence. She has a great deal to say about recurring themes and motifs, and about the common problems faced by later retellers, for instance the difficulties that medieval writers had in interpreting obsolete customs. There is much that is interesting and informative here. She has less to say, however, about individual retellings, and while she demonstrates the importance of considering each separate text with reference to the tradition from which it draws, she has left a great deal of room for the specialist's study of these later versions. In this regard, her treatment of Gower appears to be typical. While she treats it in contrast to the other surviving versions, she makes no effort to deal with the problem of Gower's exact sources. The "RA" version of the "Historia" that she reprints, first of all, is not the one that Gower used; and the question of which surviving copy of version "RB" is most like the text he did use never comes up. She also has little to say about the relation between the "Historia" and the source that Gower himself cites, in Godfrey of Viterbo's "Pantheon." Nor does she provide a full account of Gower's alterations: her comments on Gower's reshaping of the tale are limited to the areas that she has identified as "Problems in the Plot," and she makes no real attempt to account for Gower's conception of the tale or of the relation between its narrative and its "lesson." All of these questions are raised, of course, by her own discussion. Readers of Gower, especially those unfamiliar with the background of the tale, will find a great deal that is useful in Archibald's book (and they will want to keep the excellent endpiece map of Apollonius' voyages near at hand). But it is still only a starting point for the serious study of the tale, which is the longest and in some ways the most important in Confessio Amantis. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Archibald, Elizabeth Published Archibald, Elizabeth. "Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations." Cambridge: Brewer, 1991 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Apollonius of Tyre: Medieval and Renaissance Themes and Variations. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Bertolet surveys the development of the story of Lucretia from its earliest surviving classical versions, in Livy and Ovid, through its most important medieval retellings to its appearance in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Gower's Confession Amntis. The medieval versions, beginning with Jerome and Augustine, show an increasing interest in the predicament of Lucretia and a preoccupation with the individual soul, and a corresponding lack of interest in the social dimensions of the story, including the role of the family of the victim and the overthrow of the tyranny and oppression represented by the rape. Chaucer too focuses on the personal rather than the public aspect of the story. Gower, however, returns to the emphases of Livy's version, giving central importance to the two male characters, Aruns and Brutus; denouncing Aruns' betrayal of both civic and social responsibility, and of both kingship and kinship; and casting the story as a struggle between a willful tyrant and the power of the people. Aruns exemplifies the central sin of "division"; Brutus exemplifies the love of family and of nation as a unitive principle. Brutus' role as reformer resembles that which Gower assumes for himself, as spokesman of the voice of the people seeking restoration of order and of peace. And Aruns' fate constitutes a warning to the king of the dangers of popular revolt, a warning that went unheeded as Richard suffered the same fate as Aruns when the future Henry IV assumed the role of Brutus. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bertolet, Craig E Published Bertolet, Craig E. "From Revenge to Reform: The Changing Face of 'Lucrece' and Its Meaning in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 70 (1991), pp. 403-421. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource From Revenge to Reform: The Changing Face of 'Lucrece' and Its Meaning in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As her title indicates, Copeland's study is concerned with the relation between medieval translation and the traditional systems of rhetoric and hermeneutics, as they were inherited from classical authors and redefined during the Middle Ages; and with the ways in which vernacular translations appropriated some of the "cultural privilege" of the Latin academic discourse that shaped and informed it. Her opening chapters trace the interaction between rhetoric and hermeneutics as discursive constructs during the late classical and medieval periods; she then examines the vernacular translations of Ovid, Martianus Capella, and Boethius, which grow out of the Latin exegetical tradition but which reveal varying sorts of relationship to the source text. Her final chapter, on "Translation as rhetorical invention," treats Chaucer's Prologue to Legend of Good Women and Gower's Confessio Amantis. CA represents the furthest extreme of the development she describes: Gower adopts the exegetical structure of its predecessors, but that structure becomes so dominant that it accentuates the differences between Gower's text and its sources (hence CA is rarely examined as a "translation"). Gower's debt to the exegetical tradition includes his two "prologues," the marginal commentary, the ordinatio of the text, and the figure of Genius, who functions as a projection of the author, "a disguise for the author's auto-exegesis" -- all of which provide an interpretive framework within which the tales are to be read, and to which they are subordinated. The structure that dominates -- the principal means by which Gower reshapes his inherited material to his own moral purpose -- is the compilatio, with its accompanying divisio and ordinatio. Gower's use of divisio is evident not just in the classification according to the Seven Deadly Sins but also in the structure of Book 7; this book, a survey of human knowledge with emphasis on ethics, provides a hermeneutical key to the entire CA, integrating the poem on several levels while it shifts the thematic focus from the individual sinner to the need for common profit. But while divisio provides both a hermeneutical procedure and an epistemological system, it also used in CA to describe the discord and fragmentation of society, of history, and of language. Gower's own use of the vernacular is implicated, of course, in the fragmentation of language; while Latin culture seeks to contain disorder by an aritificial transcending of time and place, CA provides its own example of the divisioun that it condemns. But Gower adopts the ordering apparatus of divisio textus as a way of healing this divisioun, turning a hermeneutical tool into a form of ethical action, in so doing reconceiving the function of academic discourse and augmenting the value of the vernacular as a vehicle for social reform. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Copeland, Rita Published Copeland, Rita. "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts." Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literatures, 11 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This book presents the story of Apollonius in an Early West Saxon normalized text in parallel with the Late West Saxon version, and also contains the Middle English version in Confession Amantis. The three texts are footnoted, and the Early West Saxon version and Gower's version are equipped with glossary. In English. [Noted by Masayoshi Ito. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kobayashi, Eichi Published Kobayashi, Eichi. "The Story of Apollonius of Tyre in Old and Middle English." Tokyo: Sansyusya, 1991 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Story of Apollonius of Tyre in Old and Middle English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Sansyusya, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review MacAdam invokes Gower's CA as a point of comparison for his examination of a Spanish American novel, the Tres tristes tigres of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, first published in 1967. There is no suggestion of direct influence, but Gower provides a model for some of the procedures and forms that Cabrera Infante both adopts and parodies, including the flexibility of structure, the use of narrative for a didactic purpose, and the dialogue in the form of a confession that leads to the restoration of identity of the penitent, a conclusion that MacAdam compares to the conventional restoration of identity in the romance form. There is more on Cabrera Infante than on Gower here -- the critique that is offered is heavily indebted to Bakhtin -- but MacAdam gives an interesting perspective on some of the formal aspects of CA that are still being debated by Gower scholars. In Spanish. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor MacAdam, Alfred J. Published MacAdam, Alfred J.. "Confessio Amantis." Revista Iberoamericana 57 (1991), pp. 203-213. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Discusses the depiction of the three major characters in Chaucer's ("Legend of Good Women"), Gower's ("Confessio Amantis") and Ovid's ("Metamorphoses")versions of the legend of Philomela. Gower preserves the favorable description of Tereus at the beginning of the tale, while Chaucer emphasizes his villainy. Despite opening the way for the "tragedy" of his transformation, however, Gower shows less sympathy for Tereus than he does for other characters overcome by love, and gives less attention to his psychology. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Oka, Saburo Published Oka, Saburo. "Characterization by Ovid, Gower and Chaucer of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela Story." Thought Currents in English Literature (Aoyama Gakuin University) 64 (1991), pp. 1-15. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Characterization by Ovid, Gower and Chaucer of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela Story Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Examines the frame narrative of Confession Amantis as the confrontation of two very different aesthetics, that of the poetry of fin' amors, which provides the language with which Amans' experience is depicted, and that of the "ethical poetic" which provides the underlying structure to Gower's poem. The courtly love lyrics, the allegorical love narratives, and the dits amoureux set the extremes of love in an atemporal poetic stasis which offers an endless possibility of fulfillment, and deal evasively with any hint of change or the passing of time that might pose a threat to the endlessness of youth. Even the dits amoureux are more lyric than narrative, and when old age is invoked, as it is by both Machaut and Froissart in poems often mentioned as models for CA, it does not have the finality that it does for Amans, and does not undermine the poet's commitment to his love. There are numerous echoes of this earlier verse in the portrayal of Amans, and the same poetry allows the largely non-narrative nature of Gower's frame. Like his predecessors, moreover, Amans is allowed to ignore the logical implications of the cruelty of Fortune and of Love to his pursuit. The reader is thus encouraged to read the poem as a traditional dit amoureux, and also therefore to think of Amans as young. The revelation of Amans' old age closes the poem abruptly by revealing his unfitness for courtly love. Gower invokes here the view of old age found in two very different sources: that of classical and post-classical Latin poetry, where old age is a time of physical, particularly sexual, debility, and that of Raison in Jean de Meun's portion of RR, who argues that old age can lead the lover from the follies and instabilities of youth into virtue. The ending also places Amans directly in the world of change and time, Fortune, Nature, and Christian morality that the poetry of fin' amors seeks to deny. The collapse of the frame narrative, and of Amans' self-deception, is also a revelation of the deception that has been practiced on the reader. It makes of the frame narrative itself a figure of worldly instability and deception, and implicitly reduces all poetry of courtly love to mere delusion. Even Gower's naming of himself at the end, which would have reminded the audience of the poet's own old age, and which recalls the statement on the poet's "feigning to be a lover" in an early rubric, constitutes a comment on the fictive and delusive nature of all such narrative. Gower appropriates the aesthetic of his predecessors, therefore, in order to to subvert it, and uses the frame of his poem as another exemplum of the misleading nature of all experience in an unstable world. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Zeeman, Nicolette Published Zeeman, Nicolette. "The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative of the Confessio Amantis." Medium AEvum 60 (1991), pp. 222-240. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Verse of Courtly Love in the Framing Narrative of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review John Fisher dated Gower's CB to the early 1370's, as part of his argument on Gower's participation in the London Pui. If he is correct, CB contains the earliest surviving examples of rhyme royal by an English poet. Dean, like Macaulay, holds out for a later date, and presents a small number of evident imitations of Chaucer from ``In Praise of Peace'' and the ``Supplication'' in CA 8.2217-2300 (but not from Traitié or CB) to argue that Gower's use of rhyme royal in both French and English was based on Chaucer's. The bulk of his essay is an examination of Gower's use of the stanza form in these four poems, with frequent comparison to Chaucer. Unlike Chaucer, who adopted the rhyme royal stanza for narrative verse in such poems as T&C and 2NT, Gower used rhyme royal only for his monitory ``IPP'' and in his philosophically oriented love-lyrics. In CB, Gower adopts (much more straightforwardly than Chaucer) both his imagery and his narrator from his French predecessors. He also reveals the ``universalizing, philosophical tendency'' that comes to fruition in CA. The two poems that Dean examines closely reveal Gower's effective use of enjambement and the concluding couplet, and his skillful use of the stanza form to articulate his argument. Traitié demonstrates a similar degree of skill, but is less interesting poetically than CB. Its main interest derives from the juxtaposition of the treatise form and its moralizing glosses with the depiction of the lover's experience in the secular lyrics. The strengths of ``IPP'' are much like those of Chaucer's similar moral balades, and the rhyme royal stanza lends dignity, high seriousness, and elegance. The ``Supplication,'' finally, is Gower's ``most `Chaucerian' moment,'' deftly blending natural, colloquial language with classical allusion, all within the artifice of the stanza form, and manipulating both caesura and enjambement to give individuality and credibility to the traditional complaint. Dean's essay is a valuable discussion of verse that is rarely examined closely; his argument is marred, however, by some troubling mistranslations of Gower's French. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dean, James Published Dean, James. "Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal." Studies in Philology 88 (1991), pp. 251-275. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and Rhyme Royal Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Chaucer had two sources for Man of Law's Tale, Gower's tale of Constance, and Gower's source, the version of the story in Trevet's "Chronicles." Most earlier studies (notably Block's) have simply assumed that Trevet was Chaucer's principal source, and have credited Gower only with a few small details that Trevet does not provide. A fairer consideration of the three texts side by side not only restores some of the importance of Gower's version, but also yields a very different picture of how Chaucer set about composing MLT. The basic story, of course, is identical in all three versions. In his choice of details, Chaucer can often be found turning from one source to the other, suggesting that he had MS copies of each before him as he worked. The most general difference between Gower's version and Trevet's is that Gower's is much shorter and more carefully focused: it is Gower who first raises Constance herself above the background of the chronicle account of her life, and who first emphasizes the pathos of the story. Gower also found a way of sharpening the focus of each episode, and of providing a memorable image or picture where Trevet was scattered or diffuse. In all these respects Chaucer consistently followed Gower's model, and it appears that both in the way that he visualized the story and in his general strategy for presenting it, it was Gower's tale rather than Trevet's that Chaucer chose to retell. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "The Man of Law's Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower." Chaucer Review 23 (1991), pp. 163-181. ISSN 0009-2002 Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Man of Law's Tale: What Chaucer Really Owed to Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Penn State University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Santano Moreno offers important new evidence on the dates of both the surviving Castilian translation of CA by Juan de Cuenca and the lost Portuguese translation of Robert Payn on which it was based. It has been assumed that the Portuguese version was done during the reign of João I (1385-1433), who was married to Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt (ob. 1413). Santano Moreno finds, however, that the Spanish translator's rendering of Gower's "an hundred pounds" (CA 5.2719) as "seys çientas coronas" corresponds almost precisely to the rate of exchange fixed by decree during the first years of João's successor, King Duarte (1433-38), who was also well known for his own literary activity. Such a date is not inconsistent with what is known about the life of Robert Payn. Duarte is also known to have corresponded with his cousin Juan II of Castile about their common interests in literature, accounting for the subseqeunt transmission of the work into Spain. Santano Moreno cites Juan de Cuenca's reference to himself as a "vesjno de la çibdad de Huete" to demonstrate that the Castilian translation could not have been done before 1428, the year in which Huete first received a royal charter. He also provides a new date for the single surviving manuscript: where it has been believed until now that was written between 1400 and 1450, Santano Moreno maintains on the basis of the watermarks and the hand that it must date from the last decades of the fifteenth century. In the course of his argument, Santano Moreno summarizes most that has previously been written about the two translations, and he provides a bibliography. His essay is now the best place to begin for anyone interested in the transmission of Gower's work outside of England. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 10.2] [This article also appears as "Some Observations on the Dates and Circumstances of the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower's 'Confessio Amantis'." SELIM 1 (1991): 106-22.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "The Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower, 'Confessio Amantis'." Manuscripta 35 (1991), pp. 23-34. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower, 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The translation of Gower's Confessio exists in one manuscript, Escorial g-ii-19, rendered in the Castilian dialect, with some evidence of an Aragonese scribe. The only extant edition is rife with errors of language and transcription, and a rare book as well, thus making the need for a reliable and available scholarly text paramount. Many salient questions remain unanswered about the Castilian MS, including especially its date and origin. Not a holograph, the Escorial copy represents the work of at least two scribes. Their exemplar was an earlier Spanish MS (now lost), itself a translation by one Juan de Cuenca of the work of Robert Payn, an Englishman resident in Portugal who rendered Gower's English into Portuguese. Neither the date of the Escorial MS, nor that of the lost Portuguese translation of Payn, has been established with certainty. Moreno presents the various proposed dates and dismisses them, calling attention to two indications in the Escorial MS itself which seem to fix de Cuenca's works as occurring between 1433 and 1435. The first date is de Cuenca's naming himself, in the first paragraph of his translation, a citizen of the city ("cibdad") of Huete, a technical reference impossible before formal incorporation of Huete in 1428. The second is the translation of Gower's monetary "an hundred pounds" (CA V, 2719) as "six hundred coronas" ("seys cientas coronas"). This Moreno argues could only have come into the Escorial MS as a direct carry-over from the Portuguese, following the establishment of the exchange rate in 1433 by King Duarte of Portugal of reaes and coroas to the English pound in quantities equating a hundred pounds to 612.5 coroas – or "coronas", in Castilian. Hence on internal grounds, Moreno places the date of de Cuenca's version of the Confessio Amantis at 1433-1435. THIS articles also appears under the title "The Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower, 'Confessio Amantis'" in Manuscript 35 (1991): 23-34. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Some Observations on the Dates and Circumstances of the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower's Confessio Amantis." SELIM 1 (1991), pp. 106-122. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Title A name given to the resource Some Observations on the Dates and Circumstances of the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese and Castilian Translations of John Gower's Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review As should be expected, Gower is cited a number of times in this collection of essays by some of the leading students of Middle English dialectology and textual transmission. M.L. Samuels includes Gower in his discussion of the appearance of western forms in manuscripts written in London, in "Scribes and manuscript traditions" (pp. 1-7). His argument is that western forms are more prominent than other non-London spellings because eastern forms are less different, and because Northern scribes, because of the greater difference in their dialect, would strive harder to copy literatim. And Jeremy Smith's earlier demonstration of the prevalence of literatim copying in the tradition of Gower manuscripts is cited here by Smith himself, in his essay on "Tradition and innovation in South-West-Midland Middle English" (pp. 53-65), and by Ronald Waldron, in his "Dialect Aspects of Manuscripts of Trevisa's Translation of the Polychronicon" (pp. 67-87). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Riddy, Felicity, ed. Published Riddy, Felicity, ed. "Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English." York Manuscript Conference: Proceeding Series, 2 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays Celebrating the Publication of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism is meant to gather in one place representative examples of some major approaches to the Confessio Amantis, and to illustrate, by the choice of some of the landmarks of Gower criticism, how the study of the poem has evolved. It includes English translations of two essential essays available hitherto only in German. The contents are: G.C. Macaulay, `The Confessio Amantis' (from The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1908); C.S. Lewis, `Gower' (from The Allegory of Love, 1936); George R. Coffman, `John Gower in His Most Significant Role' (1945); J.A.W. Bennett, `Gower's ``Honeste Love''' (1966); Derek Pearsall, `Gower's Narrative Art' (1966); Arno Esch, `John Gower's Narrative Art,' translated by Linda Barney Burke (1968); George D. Economou, `The Character Genius in Alan de Lille, Jean de Meun, and John Gower' (1970); Götz Schmitz, `Rhetoric and Fiction: Gower's Comments on Eloquence and Courtly Poetry' (translated by the author from chapter three of The Middel Weie: Stil- und Aufbauformen in John Gowers `Confessio Amantis', 1974); Denise N. Baker, `The Priesthood of Genius: A Study of the Medieval Tradition' (1976); A.J. Minnis, `John Gower: Sapiens in Ethics and Politics' (1980); and Kurt Olsson, `Natural Law and John Gower's Confessio Amantis' (1982). The volume concludes with a list of `Suggestions for Further Reading. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter, ed. Published Nicholson, Peter, ed. "Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology." Publications of the John Gower Society, 3 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Confessio Amantis: A Critical Anthology. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Yonekura has systematically checked every word in Pickles and Dawson's Concordance to Gower's CA against both MED and OED, and he offers several long lists presenting his results. He finds 265 words for which Gower appears as the first citation in the OED, of which 141 are still in current use, plus 26 other words "which only Gower first used in English," which evidently means "for which Gower's is the only recorded use." He finds an additional 459 words for which Gower provides the first use under a particular definition in the OED; 263 of these senses are still in current use. He evidently made rather less use of the MED: he cites eight words listed in the MED that OED omits (all beginning with A, C or D), and four words for which OED gives a citation earlier than the MED's (all beginning with A). A bit of bibliographical history might have been appropriate here: the anomalies he finds early in the alphabet (many of which involve collocations that may or may not be compounds, according to an editor's choice) are no doubt due to the appearance of Macaulay's edition of CA while the OED was already in progress. Yonekura also fails to note anywhere that the MED itself is still incomplete. There are a few other quibbles that one could make: the first that comes to mind is that Gower's "basketh" (CA 3.315) is not neglected by both OED and MED as Yonekura claims, but appears is OED s.v. "bask" (Yonekura evidently looked for a non-existent "baskle"). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1.] Author/Editor Author/Editor Yonekura, Hiroshi Published Yonekura, Hiroshi. "Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary." In Kotoba no kozo to rekishi. Structural and Historical Studies on Languages: Essays Presented to Dr. Kazuo Araki on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Ed. Nakano, Hirozo and Araki, Kazuo. Tokyo: Eichosa, 1991, pp. 503-24. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Contribution to the English Vocabulary Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Eichosa, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Reopens the question of Gower's relation to Boethius "De Consolatione Philosophiae" and to the well-known allegorical works that derived from it, notably Alan de Lille's "De Planctu Naturae" and RR. DCP, he claims, is less straightforward a work than is usually supposed, for in the dialogue between Lady Philosophy and the "Prisoner," its broadest philosophical affirmations are consistently punctuated, and undermined, by existential doubt. It also leaves unresolved a contradiction between two roles attributed to Nature: one the benevolent universal order, and the other, a constraint upon the freedom and aspirations of the individual. DPN preserves the same ambiguity regarding Nature and creates the same sort of irresolution, but it also suggests a different way of measuring human love in its brief echoes of the diction of courtly vernacular poetry. Jean de Meun's portion of RR continues the interplay of the "courtly" and "cosmic" perspectives, setting the model for CA. Gower's poem is also concerned with the relation between human life and the larger natural order, but like all of these, it sees this relation largely in terms of uncertainty rather than resolution. The Prologue, for instance, raises a number of serious issues, but offers no coherent definition of man's "nature" or of his relation to the larger cosmos. The same uncertainty is reflected in other ways in Gower's design. The functions of the dialogue in DCP, Wetherbee claims, are taken over in Gower's poem by the interplay between the Latin and the English portions of the text. The authority of the Latin tradition, moreover, is consistently undermined by being (literally) marginalized, and through the persistent, calculated ambiguities of the Latin head-verses. Genius is less a spokesman for a particular view in this plan than a mediator between the Latin and vernacular worlds of meaning, but he himself has no basis for resolving their conflicting claims. He also tries to create a relationship between the exemplary tales and Amans, the lover who is the prisoner of courtly convention, expressing the difficulty of applying Latin tradition to the "radically vernacular world" of the main body of the poem. Genius is marked by an "enlightened naturalism" and an instinctive sense of "kynde" and reason that offers one sort of mediation between the conflicting claims on human behavior, but his insight remains only tentative, and the poem finally offers no clear and definitive statement on the problem of human self-governance. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wetherbee, Winthrop Published Wetherbee, Winthrop. "Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 7-35. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Latin Structure and Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Treats "Confessio Amantis" as an "Ovidian" rather than as a "Boethian" poem and finds a particular sort of "dialogue" within CA. The form of the poem, he argues (as he has before), with its lengthy Prologue and its extensive marginal glossing, derives at least in part from the typical apparatus and vocabulary of the medieval commented versions of classical texts, particularly of Ovid. One of the issues raised by these earlier commentators was that of the moral "authority" of poetic texts, in comparison to those of philosophy. Dante set the example for applying the same question to vernacular poetry, particularly poetry concerned with love. In function, Gower's apparatus is very much like that of Dante's in the "Convivio": it attempts to show the moral usefulness of the work and to assert its claim to "authority"; and as Gower serves as critic of his own text, he also separates himself from it, distinguishing the auctor from his persona. Gower's effort was very different from Chaucer's, who neither sought "authority" for himself nor was inclined to attribute very much to his predecessors. The result, however, is not necessarily a complete congruence of all of the elements of CA, nor even a complete dominance of the Latin moralization over the vernacular portion of the poem. The tension between "auctor sapiens" and "persona amans" remains, Minnis asserts, following the model of the Ovidian tradition. And focusing on Amans rather than on Genius, Minnis argues that the vernacular portion of the poem, with its sympathetic treatment of human love, retains a self-justifying validity almost to the very end. The meaning of the poem is not summed up by its Latin glosses, therefore; and where there is a tension between Latin and vernacular, Gower must have been aware of it, and must have relished it. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, A. J Published Minnis, A. J. "De Vulgari Auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and Men of Great Authority." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 36-74. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource De Vulgari Auctoritate: Chaucer, Gower and Men of Great Authority Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues for a broader view of "source" and "influence" than merely narrative borrowing, and urges us to consider more than merely the tales with identifiable analogues in assessing Chaucer's debt to Gower. By this standard, Chaucer's most "Gowerian" tale is the Parson's, with its emphasis on sin and the consequent implications on the thematic structure of the pilgrimage. While Chaucer emphasizes grace and repentance, however, Gower places all his emphasis on individual moral reform. The comparison thus reveals contrasts as well as similarities between the two poets, and the Parson's might in this sense be Chaucer's least "Gowerian" tale. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "Chaucer's Most 'Gowerian' Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 75-84. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Most 'Gowerian' Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Argues that not only did Gower provide Chaucer's most important model for his tale, but that he also may have been Chaucer's "source" for his copy of Trevet's "Chronicles." The evidence includes the known friendship of the two poets, the limited manuscript circulation of the work, the fact that Chaucer shows no familiarity with any of the rest of its contents, and the very important fact that Gower got to it first. It also includes the indications that the two poets had access to a very similar copy of Trevet, as revealed by their handling of the names of the characters in the tale. If Chaucer did borrow the book from his friend, the result is a more concrete instance of their literary interaction than we have otherwise been able to document. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Nicholson, Peter Published Nicholson, Peter. "Chaucer Borrows From Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law's Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 85-99. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer Borrows From Gower: The Sources of the Man of Law's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Undertakes a detailed, point by point comparison of Gower's and Chaucer's tales--the portrayal of the hero, the nature of his crime, the terms of his quest, his behavior both before and after his marriage, his final choice, and the concluding "disenchantment"--in order to bring to light the authors' separate purposes, and to defend the notion that Gower's tale has a logic and beauty of its own, however different from Chaucer's. The principal difference between the two embraces their moral purpose and their use of transformation: in Beidler's words: "Gower has Genius tell the Tale of Florent as a means of transforming Amans, a character outside the tale, into a man worthy of a good woman's love, while Chaucer, on the other hand, has Alice tell the 'Wife of Bath's Tale' to illustrate how a lusty young knight inside the tale is transformed into a man worthy of a good woman's love. . . . Gower's tale demontrates how a cautious and near-perfect knight does behave in a dangerous and hostile situation, whereas Chaucer's tale shows how an impulsive and most imperfect knight learns how to behave in a far less threatening situation" (pp. 100-101). Gower's is a more straightforward sort of romance, while Chaucer's might be seen as a feminist parody of the traditional romance form. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Beidler, Peter G Published Beidler, Peter G. "Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 100-114. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Transformations in Gower's Tale of Florent and Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Yeager, R.F Published Yeager, R.F. "Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 115-129. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Review Reminds us how different the linguistically diverse culture of Gower's and Chaucer's England must have been from the monolingual culture of most modern readers. Where multilingualism was a common experience, English itself was in a state of flux, an evident cause of anxiety for some (see T&C 5.1793-98), but also a unique opportunity for those who would shape or transform the language. Gower allows us to see how English interacted with French and Latin since he wrote so extensively in all three. For one example, Yeager examines Gower's use of the near synonyms "nature" and "kynde" in his English writing. Where Chaucer used the two words with approximately equal frequency, Gower had a marked preference for "kynde," and he seems to have distinguished the words in a way that Chaucer did not. "Nature"----the Latinate, or "higher" form----refers more commonly to "Natura" as God's vicar, and with reference to humans, includes the power of reason and the necessity of moral choice, while "kynde"----from the native or "lower" register----refers to the domain of the instinctual, and thus amoral, "natural law." Gower can thus be seen taking advantage of the "polylinguistic fluidity" of his times. Yeager concludes by examining how Gower maintains his distinction between the two words in his "Tale of Iphis" (CA 4.451 ff.), and how they contribute to the understanding of his tale. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Learning to Read in Tongues: Writing Poetry for a Trilingual Culture Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Begins by reviewing the history of the notion that Chaucer and Gower had a falling out and quarrelled with one another through their poetry during the 1390's. She asks why the idea of a quarrel has appealed so strongly to scholars for more than two centuries: "What desire might it fantastically fulfill?" (p. 132). And she suggests that the underlying assumption is that "aggression is necessary to the articulation or assertion of a strong, coherent character, an identity" (p. 132). Such an assumption is dangerous, she argues, for the consolidation of masculine identity in a male-dominated culture takes place through the elimination of, and therefore at the expense of, the feminine; and there is a continuity between this habit of thought and the violent eradication of female identity and autonomy in rape. As a step towards the creation of other sorts of relationships between men, Dinshaw turns to Gower's tale of Philomela and Chaucer's T&C, and uses the first as a gloss to the second in order to construct a reading that "does not obfuscate but rather clarifies the fact and the threat of violence to women's bodies" (p. 136). Gower typically describes Tereus' rape of Philomela as an anomalous, bestial act, avoiding judgment of similar, but socially sanctioned, "gender-assymetrical acts" such as Tereus' marriage to Procne; and as elsewhere in CA, he treats the crime as an offense of one man against another. The sisters' revenge has an ironic appropriateness: through rape, Tereus reinforces his own identity, "thus violently refusing mortality and disaggregation," but in consuming his own son, "he destroys his own legitimate chance at life beyond his own decay" (pp. 138-39). In the metamorphoses with which Gower concludes the tale, finally, the violation of the woman is transformed, in Philomela's song, into the lyric conventions of amorous suffering. The story of Procne and Philomela lurks behind the action of Book 2 of T&C. The nightingale's song serves as the harbinger to Criseyde's dream of the eagle and the exchange of hearts, which anticipates the romantic love talk of the following books. But the dream puts the violent mutilation of the woman before our eyes. And Gower's tale helps us understand that courtly love discourse also "encodes the bodily violation and destruction of a woman" (p. 141). Taking the two poems together, she concludes, reveals the "violent obliteration of the woman" that each tends to conceal, and using the two texts in conjunction, rather than as rivals, also provides a model for a more productive sort of relationship among men. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dinshaw, Carolyn Published Dinshaw, Carolyn. "Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer." In Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange. Ed. Yeager, R.F.. ELS Monograph Series (51). Victoria, B.C.: English Literary Studies, 1991, pp. 130-152. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available English Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fichte is principally concerned with the very different responses to Chaucer's auctoritas manifested by Lydgate in his "Siege of Thebes" and by Henryson in his "Testament of Cresseid." Gower appears only briefly in the opening part of this essay, in order to provide contrast to Chaucer's refusal to assert, his own auctoritas: depending heavily on A.J. Minnis, Fichte points to Gower's assumption of the roles of the prophet in VC and of philosopher in CA. He also notes the paradox of Gower's and Chaucer's reception by later poets: despite Gower's conscious attempt to present himself as auctor, his works received only perfunctory praise, while Chaucer, despite his disavowal, was almost immediately recognized for his auctoritas. Author/Editor Author/Editor Fichte, Joerg Published Fichte, Joerg. ""Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew" – Auctor and auctoritas in 15th Century English Literature." Traditionswandel und Traditionsverhalten. . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew" – Auctor and auctoritas in 15th Century English Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Niemeyer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Dauby begins her comparison of Chaucer's and Gower's social views with a detailed look at "Wife of Bath's Tale" and the "Tale of Florent." Both tales are drawn ultimately from a myth concerned with the granting of sovereignty, but both authors ignore the mythical implications. Without making any assumptions on either poet's exact source, we can identify four principal differences in the plots of their respective versions: Gower provides more of a historical frame for the tale, while Chaucer maintains more of the atmosphere of a fairy tale; the story begins in one case with the killing of another knight, in the other with a rape; the old woman offers very different alternatives to the knight in the final scene; and while Chaucer allows the implication that love transforms the one who loves or who is loved, Gower provides more rational reasons for the old woman's transformation. They also differ greatly in method. Gower's follows a straighter line; he gives names and descriptions to his characters; he specifies carefully their family relations, underlining the importance of social bonds; he rationalizes the marvelous and eliminates suspense--in brief, he privileges the clarity and vividness of the tale, while Chaucer has fun with it allows himself (or the Wife of Bath) several digressions, in the process giving us much more to think about than Gower does. Both offer the tale to illustrate a moral, but their morals are of very different sorts. Gower's interest is more social than individual: all of Florent's behavior is motivated by an effort to keep up appearances, typical of a poet whose entire work constitutes a defense of inherited social models. Chaucer, on the other hand, is more interested in the individual than in the social; "viola pourquoi la poésie de Chaucer nous touché plus pourfondément que celle de Gower." Dauby's conclusions on Gower are based on a rather small sample of the Confessio; her conclusions on Chaucer don't seem to be based very closely on her sample at all. There are also three major factual errors on the first page of the essay, which don't however impinge on the author's argument. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dauby, Hélène Published Dauby, Hélène. "Chaucer et Gower: Esquisse comparative de leurs attitudes morales et politiques." In Economie, Politique et Cultureau Moyen Age: Actes de Colloque, Paris, 19 et 29 mai 1990. Ed. Buschinger, Danielle and Spiewok, Wolfgang. WODAN: Recherches en littérature médiéval (5). Amiens: Centre d'Etudes Medievales, 1991, pp. 55-63. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer et Gower: Esquisse comparative de leurs attitudes morales et politiques Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Centre d'Etudes Medievales, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The twelfth selection in this new anthology, which illustrates the development of literary Middle English from the twelfth to the early fifteenth centuries, is an excerpt from CA (1.2399-2661), containing the warning against Boasting and the tale of "Albinus and Rosemund" (including the preceding Latin epigram, with translation, but not the two Latin side-notes), in a new transcription from Bodley Fairfax 3. The introduction to the selection provides a brief summary of Gower's life and works, his relation to Chaucer, and the structure of CA, highlighting Genius' dual roles and the sympathy with which Gower treats the figure of Amans; it also includes some brief notes on Gower's language, a very selective bibliography, and a reproduction of the page in Fairfax on which the excerpted text begins. The transcription of the text differs from Macaulay's in the regular use of thorn and yogh, and in several dozen minor differences in capitalization (Macaulay follows the MS more closely) and in punctuation (the omission of a single comma results in a slight difference in the sense at 1.2655). The notes to the text offer judicious help with the passages in which Gower's syntax differs from ours, and beginning students may not be the only ones to find them useful; the note to 1.2545 contains Burrow's explanation of the "Gripes ey." In addition to a broad range of selections from Middle English literature, both poetry and prose, the volume contains an unusually detailed linguistic introduction and a general glossary. One section of the introduction (pp. 56-57) contains a brief but very useful treatment of Gower's meter. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. Published Burrow, J. A., and Thorlac Turville-Petre, eds. "A Book of Middle English." Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Book of Middle English. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "An analysis of the influence of the 'Roman de la Rose' on the 'Confessio Amantis' allows us appreciation of the unity and coherence of John Gower's major English poem, and illuminates aspects of Gower's poetic practice which have been marginalized in criticism." RR is the "generic model" of CA, "from which Gower derives not only the main characters but also the central theme and ironic textual strategy" of his poem. "Both poems are concerned with the relationship of sexual desire to reason . . . . [and this] opposition is explored through the juxtaposition of amatory and moral literary traditions and arguments of inadequate authority figures in the absence of a definitive authorial point of view . . . ." RR "provides Gower with the model for his deployment of digressions to place sexual desire in the context of essential human nature . . . . Thus the digressions in the 'Confessio Amantis' function as integral parts of the poem which possesses both intellectual and formal unity . . . . In the digressions in Book V of the 'Confessio Amantis,' for example, Gower draws on the presentation of the narrative of Venus and Mars in the 'Roman de la Rose' to question the allegorical interpretation of Ovidian exempla, and to dramatize the comic difficulties created by Genius's irreconcilable commitments to the amatory and the moral." Author/Editor Author/Editor Robson, A. N. Published Robson, A. N. "The Influence of the 'Roman de la Rose' on the 'Confessio Amantis'." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Cambridge, 1991. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 40.4 (1991), no. 7417. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Influence of the "Roman de la Rose" on the "Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The brief entry on Gower in Hicks's compilation synopsizes Gower's life and works, emphasizing his conventionality and social criticism. Hicks cites John H. Fisher's "John Gower: Moral Philosopher and Friend of Chaucer" (1965) for further information, and quotes briefly from G. L. Harriss's Introduction to "Henry V: The Practice of Kingship" (1985) where Gower is referred to as being, among Ricardian poets, the "most representative" of the middle stratum of society. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 43.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hicks, Michael A. Published Hicks, Michael A. Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1991. Pp. 178–80. Gower Subject Bibliographies, Reports, and Reference Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Who's Who in Late Medieval England, 1272–1485. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1991 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower doesn't seem to have made a secret in CA either of his debility or of his old age. In both versions of the Prologue, he refers to his lingering illness, and in the revelation in the mirror at the end, he depicts himself as a withered old man. But Levine would have us dig Gower's true feelings about himself out of more subtle clues in the text of the main body of the poem. CA is, he asserts, "among other things, the long, bad dream of a sick old man" (p. 89). It is evidently important to his argument that it be a dream rather than some other form of covert self-revelation, for he labors to assimilate the poem to the genre of the dream vision though Gower neglects to say precisely that his narrator ever falls asleep. Among the passages that Levine finds most revealing are the several scattered allusions to blindness in the poem, which he interprets in view of the poet's more specific references to his loss of sight in the prefatory epistle of VC, not noting that some ten years passes between the composition of CA and the VC dedication. When Amans, seeing his wrinkled face in the mirror, declares that "Mi will was tho to se nomore" (8.2831), Levine finds not a turning away from the glass but an allusion to the poet's literal inability to see of considerable dramatic irony. Blindness was associated in Gower's mind with castration, he asserts. He finds other evidence of the poet's fear of impotence in his consciousness of the world's decay, and evidence of his fear of "reification" in the recurring image of the key. The great length of Book 5, finally, is due to the link between greed and sexuality, but also to the association of Avarice with old age. It is not a pretty picture. For a contrast to this pathological view, and for a consideration of some of the many passages that Levine does not refer to (such as the vision of the company of old lovers at 8.2666 ff.), that suggest a broader range of feeling about old age than he is willing to allow, one should return to J.A. Burrow's discussion of the ending of CA in his 1983 essay in Responses and Reassessments or more briefly in The Ages of Man (1988). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Levine, Robert Published Levine, Robert. "Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevistik 5 (1992), pp. 79-94. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower as Gerontion. Oneiric Autobiography in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is given more than six pages (286-93) in Rigg's new survey, compared to the one-sentence than he gets in the epilogue to F.J.E. Raby's History of Secular Latin Poetry in the Middle Ages (2 vols., 1934). The importance of this new book, however, lies neither in the prominence that it gives to Gower, nor even in what Rigg has to say about Gower's works, but in the company in which Gower appears here. The six-page account is mostly summary, of VC, TC, and the shorter Latin poems, with some pertinent critical comment and some description of the Latin passages in CA as well. But who other than Rigg would have thought of declaring that VC is "the first substantial Anglo-Latin work in unrhymed elegiac couplets since Henry of Avranches," and where else but here can one turn to find out who Henry of Avranches was, and what he wrote? Rigg surveys over one hundred named authors in this book, most of whom are entirely neglected in all conventional accounts of "English literature," plus an uncounted number of anonymous writers. For each, the description is necessarily brief, but well illustrated with excerpts, and alert both to the special qualities of each author and to his or her place in the literature of the time. The arrangement is chronological, and each chapter begins with a brief but useful account of the political and literary context of the period. What is most remarkable about all this is the sense of a history that Riggs is able to create, in contrast to the isolation in which so many writers in English seem to have worked during most of this time. And not only does Gower's Latin writing appear much less of an anomaly, but one begins to notice parallels to Gower's work in Rigg's account of some of his predecessors, suggesting whole new areas of research for future scholars for whom Rigg's book will be an indispensable vade mecum. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Rigg, A. G. Published Rigg, A. G.. "A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Minor Latin Poetry Cronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 1066-1422. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Cambridge University Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In Vox Clamantis 4.601-2, Gower describes the visits of Genius to the nuns of the cloister: "Sit licet in capa furrata, dum docet ipse, / Nuda tamen valde iura ministrat eis" (trans. Stockton, p. 180: "Although he may be in a fur-lined cape while he is giving instructions, he nevertheless ministers his naked authority to them forcefully"). The "capa furrata" refers to the "fur-lined gown of an educated layman or cleric," according to Ronnick, and echoes other examples of the deceptiveness of attire in VC. The "nuda iura," while obviously referring to the method of Genius' instruction, also recalls an actual legal term found in both Justinian and Bracton, referring to ownership by mere possession rather than by right. But hasn't Ronnick missed another anatomical pun in the "furred cape"? The very next line describes the nuns as being "stoned" without being injured; on this passage, see Stockton's note, p. 420. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Ronnick, Michele Valerie Published Ronnick, Michele Valerie. "Capa Furrata and Nuda Iura: Vox Clamantis, 4.601-2." Notes and Queries 237 (1992), pp. 444-445. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Capa Furrata and Nuda Iura: Vox Clamantis, 4.601-2 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The "Bedford Psalter-Hours" (British Library MS Add. 42131; after 1414) contains a program of 290 portrait illustrations in the initials marking divisions in the text. Many of these can be identified with contemporaries: there are three portraits of Chaucer (two of which Wright ascribes to the same master that did the well-known Chaucer portrait in B.L. MS Harl. 4866, Hoccleve's Regement of Princes), three of Hoccleve, and ten of Gower, more than of any other single figure, and quite unusually, the work of more than a single artist. In all ten (all of which are reproduced in this essay), Gower is portrayed as a balding, bearded, and modestly dressed old man, resembling the senex amans whose illustration appears in some MSS of CA. The "unifying motif" of the Gower illustrations is the poet's "moral authority," according to Wright, who associates the particular texts chosen for Gower's portrait with his reputation as a moralist, with his blindness, and with various aspects of his works. Wright gives greatest attention to the first portrait, which appears with the text "Voce mea domine clamavi" of Psalm 141 (142), immediately suggesting Gower's Vox Clamantis. On the opposite page, at the opening of Psalm 142 (143), appears a portrait of Richard II. Wright argues that the juxtaposition was planned: "At the most elementary level Gower represents good and Richard evil. Both are alike in despair: Gower appears at a psalm which is an appeal to a Lord who does not heed his prayers and Richard II illustrates the psalm of a soul in torment, a sinner who is facing eternal damnation." Richard is depicted as youthful in this portrait, resembling the image of the king in the Wilton Diptych. Wright uses Gower's absolving of the young king in his first version of VC to explain the anomaly, and she also suggests that VC may have influenced the portrayal of a youthful, redeemable king and the inclusion of John the Baptist as the king's sponsor in the Wilton Diptych, which she dates shortly before the Bedford psalter, c. 1413. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wright, Sylvia Published Wright, Sylvia. "The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve." British Library Journal 18.2 (1992), pp. 190-201. Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Author Portraits in the Bedford Psalter-Hours: Gower, Chaucer and Hoccleve Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The exemplar of incest in Confessio Amantis is provided by Venus and Cupid; key tales demonstrate the destruction that follows incest or the union with God that follows the transcendance of incestuous passion. Incest is used by Gower as a "microcosmic symbol of society's decay"; Amans is led by Genius to reject the incestuous model of Venus and Cupid. [JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "The meaning of incest in the 'Confessio Amantis'." PhD thesis, University of Oregon, 1992. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The meaning of incest in the 'Confessio Amantis' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Gower's emphasis on remembrance is as evident as his preoccupation with division," Chandler asserts; in fact, remembrance or memory provides the means of overcoming division -- within the self, within the kingdom -- and also the motif that unifies diverse materials of the poem. "For Gower, disunity corresponds to failure." Amans' love is not so much evil as irrational, and an instance of disunity or division: he is in conflict with himself -- his will is in conflict with his reason -- because of his infatuation, and because of this division he is unable to recognize and experience until the very end of the poem the deeper love governed by reason and charity. The progress towards the restoration of his reason and the reuniting of his divided self requires three types of remembering: that of the confession, most obviously; that contained in the tales, a "more socially oriented type of remembrance," offering the memory of the successes and failures of others; and "spiritual memory," which awakens in Amans the type of love governed by charity and good will in the poem's conclusion. These three types of memory correspond to the three major parts of the poem's structure: the frame; the body; and the beginning and the end. The confession, in which the first type of memory is contained, is "more the skeleton than the focus" of CA, since it occupies fewer lines than the tales, and Amans frequently has nothing to confess. He does reveal, however, that he has allowed his imagination to supplant his reason. Genius tries to reactivate Amans' memory as a way of strengthening his wisdom and his prudence; and unlike the moment of transformation when Amans sees himself in the mirror, the reinforcement of the habit of remembering works cumulatively upon his behavior, and helps make that transformation permanent. The tales themselves, the second and most prevalent type of remembering in the poem, contain frequent references to memory, and they are typically followed by exhortations and promises to remember. "The tales provide Amans with examples by which he can remember patterns of behavior to emulate or avoid," and they serve a dual purpose: to help unify Amans so that he can govern his own nature, and to help him regain his consciousness of social conventions so that he can function constructively within his community. Some, like "Apollonius of Tyre," also teach the value of a good memory. "Spiritual memory," the third type, becomes dominant in the poem's conclusion, when John Gower the author steps forward as a Christian rather than lover and citizen, beseeching that "in thilke place / wher resteth love and alle pes / Oure joie mai ben endeles" (8.3170-72). Taking issue with Hugh White's more pessimistic analysis of the conclusion (1988; see JGN IX, no. 1), Chandler argues the compatibility of the different ideals -- of earthly love, Christian love, and Reason -- that are offered in the end, and the success of Amans' "healing." The failure of Amans' love is not a condemnation of earthly love generally; Genius attempts to lead Amans to a different type of love, governed by Reason, represented by Apollonius. Venus' banishment of Amans from love once his reason is restored is suspect, since she represents a type of love that Genius himself has rejected, and does not exclude Amans from a higher form of love. "Learning how to unify reason and love comes from remembering the eternal perspective, but White places divine and earthly love in opposition, while Gower united them by subordinating the latter to the former." The "spiritual memory" that recalls divine love surpasses the other forms of memory, but it also encompasses them, and thus provides not just the conclusion but also the binding together of the other elements of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Chandler, Katherine R. Published Chandler, Katherine R.. "Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Philological Quarterly 71 (1992), pp. 15-30. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Memory and Unity in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The surviving fifteenth-century Spanish prose translation of CA has suffered a fate quite similar to that of the English poem on which it is ultimately based (by way of a no longer extant Portuguese intermediary): despite its historical importance as the first major instance of the translation of a work of English vernacular literature into a foreign tongue, it was largely ignored until a revival of interest in the twentieth century. In the case of the Spanish version, that revival seems to be in progress at this moment. Santano Moreno's essay is for the most part a review of a new edition of the Spanish translation by Manual Alvar and Elena Alvar, eds., "Confesión del amante: Traducción de Juan de Cuenca (s. XV)" (Madrid: Anejos del Boletín de la Real Academia, 1990), which replaces that of Birch-Hirschfield, first published in 1909 and now almost unavailable. Santano Moreno offers several corrections to the account of Gower's life in the introduction, and adds some information on the dates and circumstances of both the Portuguese and Spanish translations, some of which is also contained in his own earlier essay (1991). He also points out some errors in the editors' transcription of the translation. The greatest value of this essay, however, may simply be to bring English and American readers up-to-date on Spanish scholarship on this important work. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Santano Moreno, Bernardo Published Santano Moreno, Bernardo. "Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica." Fifteenth-Century Studies 19 (1992), pp. 147-164. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Reflexiones en torno a la presencia de Confessio Amantis de John Gower en la península Ibérica Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Despite all of the interest in Gower during the last ten years, it is a safe bet that there are few who have gotten through the entire MO in Anglo-Norman, and in fact the poem is much less often considered by itself, as a whole, than it is as a compendium of allegorical and moralistic commonplaces which are extracted and cited in the study of other medieval authors. A translation into modern English is welcome, therefore, both to allow more efficient location of relevant passages but also to make it easier to get a sense of the entire poem. Wilson's translation was first done as a dissertation at the University of Miami in 1970, and it has been available to interested readers on demand from University Microfilms. It appears now in a revised version, with a preface, an introduction (somewhat shortened from the original, and still based almost entirely on Macaulay), some fifteen pages of notes supplementing Macaulay's, a more up-to-date bibliography, and a brief introductory encomium by R.F. Yeager. Wilson's prose is dry but usually to the point. To give some flavor, here are the three stanzas beginning at line 5125, introducing the discussion of Sloth: "To tell you now directly of Sloth, with whom the World intermarried, she gave birth to five daughters. Their disposition is such that they will never be worked in field or vineyard, nor will they be given up to the ordained prayers as they are commanded by sacred law. Rather they seek ease everywhere, and Somnolence, you should know, is the first of this brood. / 5137 Of Somnolence so much I can tell you: whoever is her proper offspring does his work by sleeping. If he has a bed he sleeps in it; if not, according to his mood, he seeks his entertainment elsewhere. But neither from request nor from coaxing does he labor but rather, as if heavy with sleep, both eyes closed, he dreams deeply and lies as if half dead, since he is buried in Sloth. / 5149 Somnolence lives in ease when she can sleep without objection on a soft couch enclosed by a curtain, where neither her subject nor her servant dares awaken her from any profit or damage; for then in ease she reposes and thinks of everything that will most please her delight. But if she must get up for any period of time, it seems to her a very bad thing until she can go back to her bed." The goal here is clearly to make the contents more accessible for readers with shaky medieval French; Wilson makes no attempt, and will do very little, to heighten appreciation of MO as a poem. Those who have worked with the University Microfilms version may also wonder if the translation can be relied upon. and it is a pleasure to report that the revised version by and large can, and that it is worth setting aside the old version for a copy of the new one. The original version contains some alarming mistranslations; the second stanza of the passage quoted, for instance, contains two errors in the older version which rather severely throw off the sense. A check of a much longer passage in the same section of the poem reveals that all of the obvious errors have been removed, and that there are other revisions as well at the rate of one for about every three lines, involving punctuation, word order, word choice, and substituting "you" for "thou," in each case an improvement. It is not clear, however, who should be given credit for the extensive corrections. Though Wilson, in his preface, thanks a number of people for their help in preparing the revision, the work of Nancy Wilson Van Baak, who is credited on the title page, is not otherwise acknowledged or described. The book is nicely printed and presented, though clearly with economy in mind (thus the line numbers are set within the block of text, as in the passage quoted above). A page header with the name of the virtue or vice being described would have been useful in orientating the reader; an index, too, would have been quite helpful, given the uses to which the poem is usually put. And one small but significant flaw in the layout would have been very easy to fix: though Wilson alludes to the loss of leaves at the beginning of the manuscript in his introduction, the first page of the translation contains no notice of the gap, and gives every indication that it is the actual beginning of the poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wilson, William Burton, trans. Van Baak, Nancy Wilson, rev. trans. Published Wilson, William Burton, trans. and Van Baak, Nancy Wilson, rev. trans.. "Mirour de l'omme (The Mirror of Mankind), by John Gower." Medieval Texts and Studies, 5 . East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Mirour de l'omme (The Mirror of Mankind), by John Gower. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Colleagues Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Olsson, Kurt Published Olsson, Kurt. "John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis." Publications of the John Gower Society, 4 . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Readers of JGN should be alerted that the copywriter who produced the advertising for this important new book seems to have read only the final chapter, and does not even come close to giving an accurate idea of its real contents. Olsson offers here a broad and detailed account of the structure of CA, in two different senses: first the relationship among the many components of its form, and second, its thematic structure, as Gower develops his argument from the Prologue to the conclusion. Olsson's most original contribution concerns the structure in the former sense. He describes the poem as a dialogue of several different voices: the narrator (e.g. in the Prologue); the "poet" of the Latin verses that mark the divisions in the text; the single-minded moralist of the Latin marginal glosses; Amans; and Genius, who himself speaks more than a single voice as he attempts to serve more than one master. None of these "voices" speaks for Gower himself: their interaction, however, provides the opportunity to raise questions, to consider problems, to elaborate "distinctiones," and to weigh alternative views which are finally reconciled only at the very end. In its assembling of a diversity of materials for a single purpose, Olsson invokes the model of the "compilatio," but in its posing of questions and its withholding of its resolution, the literary form that it most closely resembles, he argues, is the "demande." The conflicts and inconsistencies in the poem, particularly in Genius' discourse, have long been an obstacle, of course, for those who expected to find in CA no more than a versified sermon on the Seven Deadly Sins. Attempts to reconcile the great variety of views in the poem into a single coherent doctrine have given way more recently to the study of the poem's diversity. Both Winthrop Wetherbee and Alastair Minnis, for instance, have examined the creative tension between the Latin and vernacular portions of the text, in a collection reviewed in JGN 11.1. Olsson's is the most thorough and the most insightful study in the same genre. But while he finds a greater number of discordant voices in the poem than any previous critic, he attributes a more calculated purpose and a more specific end to the dialogue; and where Wetherbee, for instance, concludes on the poem's moral indeterminacy, for Olsson the uncertainty is all Genius', and is just a device to lead the reader through the process of discovering a moral truth. In a series of twenty short chapters, Olsson outlines the components of the structure as he finds them, and then proceeds to analyze the poem section by section to show how the argument proceeds. The themes that he traces -- nature, reason, grace -- and his account of how they are developed are familiar from his two long previously published essays on CA (see JGN 1.1, and 9.2), and as is usual of Olsson's writing, his account is too rich and too detailed to offer an adequate summary here. Some of the high points may be noted briefly: The Prologue, he argues, not only introduces some of the topoi of the poem, but also prepares the form that Gower adopts, for instance by emphasizing the uncertainty of wisdom and knowledge in this world. In Book 1, the disorders or the world are focussed upon love. The discussion of the "Sins of the Senses" raises the question of whether humans are compelled to love; in the rest of Book 1, the "jus naturae" is invoked to weigh the relation between compulsion and consent, both in Amans' behavior and in that of the characters in the tales. Book 2 presents positive examples of characters guided by "kinde" in Constance and in Constantine, though the excessive generosity of the latter raises the need for a guide beyond mere "kinde." Books 3 and 4 examines kinde further by distinguishing among grades of gentilesse, the highest form of which can only be attained through reason. In Book 5, the analogy to Midas shows Amans' love to be avaricious; the excursus on religions reveals it to be a form of fantasy akin to idolatry; and the tales, meanwhile, depict a world of vitiated nature urgently in need of grace. Book 6 contrasts the need for grace with Amans' hope and trust in Fortune; and Amans' need to grasp his own true likeness leads him, through his fantasy, to a "regio dissimilitudinis" instead. Book 7 presents the education that is the key to knowing oneself, the ability that Amans so sorely lacks, and it comes back to the question of choice, placing man in a field of causes that affect his moral decisions. It then frames the values that will be used to judge Amans' abandonment of both choice and reason in the final book. Book 8 begins with a statement of the need to restrain natural law with clear implications for Amans. At the end of the book, the categories of nature, reason, and grace are finally applied to Amans directly, and Gower uses Amans' old age as the means to articulate the need to understand one's own nature. Amans' recovery of his knowledge of himself allows him to review his life from a new perspective, and provides an analogy to England, which has also forgotten its true history. Most of these lessons emerge, of course, without the confessor's awareness: Olsson aligns himself with those who see Genius as an inadequate moral teacher, but in finding him merely indiscriminate, he does not join those who find that he actively leads Amans into sin. Olsson's argument also puts him firmly in the camp of those who find Amans guilty of an offense that puts him in need of moral correction: despite his very different view of the structure of the poem, his account of Amans' fantasy and self-delusion is very much like that offered by Peck. Also like Peck, he evaluates each tale as a moral exemplum addressed specifically to Amans' behavior and situation, and his thematic argument depends upon Amans' conversion to the morally correct stance that the poem advocates at the end. Despite the novelty of his views of the poem's structure, therefore, and even in contrast to them, this is in some ways a very traditional reading of the poem. But it is certainly among the best thought out and most thoroughly argued, and the thematic argument is solidly buttressed with evidence from outside the text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower and the Structures of Conversion: A Reading of the Confessio Amantis. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Fisher argues that the replacement of French by English in official circles in England in the early fifteenth century and the sudden appearance of large, elaborately prepared manuscripts of English poetry soon after 1400 are both linked to Henry IV's accession to the throne, and are the result of official Lancastrian policy to encourage the use of English as a means of gaining the support of Parliament and commons for Henry's usurpation. Chaucer is given a central position in his discussion, because of the large number of Chaucer manuscripts that were produced during this period, because of the recognition given to Chaucer soon after his death as the founder of English poetry, and because of Thomas Chaucer's importance in both Henry IV's and Henry V's court. Gower is given somewhat less prominence. Manuscripts of his works too are produced by some of the same scribes that produced Chaucer's during this important period. One manuscript of CA, moreover (Huntington Ellesmere 26.A.17, the "Fairfax" copy), provides evidence of Henry IV's interest in promoting the use of English even before he became king: Fisher uses the armorial insignia on its opening page to argue that it was prepared for presentation to Henry sometime between his return from France (at the end of June 1399), and his coronation (in the middle of October). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Fisher, John H Published Fisher, John H. "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England." PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 107 (1992), pp. 1168-1180. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Language Policy for Lancastrian England Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This publication of a new biography of Chaucer by one of our foremost medievalists ought to be of major interest to Gower scholars as well. Pearsall's work will be compared most often to Donald Howard's (see JGN 7, no.1), which is often cited in his new biography, not always in disagreement. (John Gardner's biography is referred to only once, and dismissed as "licentiously fictional" [p.4].) Where Howard worked hard to establish connections between Chaucer's life and his writing, to the point of using Chaucer's writing as evidence of how he thought, Pearsall keeps the two sources of our knowledge about the poet distinct. He gives a careful weighing of the documentary evidence, and is generally impatient with speculations that cannot be supported by the record, while his discussion of Chaucer's major works is mostly critical in nature, and though necessarily brief, could be read profitably apart from the biographical context in which it is placed. He also creates a very different view of Chaucer's "personality" – somewhat less genial, less tolerant, even a little less wise and less sure of his own opinions than the received view of the poet, a more complex and more interesting reading of the "man," in part because it is less familiar and also therefore less predictable. As a result of his method, Pearsall ends up giving much less attention to Gower than Howard did. He cites, of course, the known facts: the grant to Gower of power of attorney in 1378, Chaucer's and Gower's mutual references in their poetry. But where Howard had a great deal to say about their attitudes and responses to one another, based mainly on the perceptible differences between their works, Pearsall is nearly silent on their personal and literary relationship, and offers no speculations on what their friendship might have meant for their respective poetic careers. He summarizes the evidence for their "quarrel," but concludes that "it may well be a fiction" (pp. 131-33); he notes the possibility that LGW and CA may have been begun in a spirit of "friendly competition" (pp. 195-96); and records the speculation that Chaucer might have borrowed his manuscript of Trivet's Anglo-Norman Cronicles from his friend (p. 242). Otherwise, his references to Gower, like those to Langland and the Gawain-poet, are generally comparative in nature, and are sometimes used to support assertions about Chaucer that cannot be documented directly. Gower's statement about his youthful composition of songs in French (MO 27340-41), for instance, is quoted in the discussion of how Chaucer's earliest writings were also probably in French (p. 64), though typically, the evidence that either composed for a Puy is labeled "not very convincing" (p, 316, n.7). And a bit more remarkably, Pearsall uses the vision in VC Book 1 as an expression of Chaucer's as well as Gower's attitudes towards rebellion, before proceeding to a discussion of the differences between the ways in which they embodied their views in their poetry (pp. 145-47). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography." Oxford: Blackwell, 1992 ISBN 1557862052 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Blackwell, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Minnis is concerned with the sort of authority that derives from authorship as viewed by scholastic commentators in the late Middle Ages. "Can one be an author and be in love?" he asks, as he examines how vernacular poets sought validation in auctoritas while writing about love and the effects of love. Gower is one of several authors he examines, along with Juan Ruiz, the anonymous author of the commentary on "Les Echecs Amoureux," the participants in the querelle de la Rose, and commentators on Dante (including the poet himself). Gower imitated one of the formal devices that had been used to create auctoritas in earlier writers when he attached an "extrinsic prologue," dealing with wisdom generally, to the beginning of his work. He also provided his poem with its own commentary, in the form of Latin marginal glosses, which distinguish between the poet and the persona who is the victim of love, and which adopt a strict and consistently moral view of the characters in the tales. Rather than an opposition between the glosses and the English text, Minnis prefers to speak of an "interpretive distance": the English poem offers an abundance of genuine "lore," while the gloss sometimes only anticipates ethical views made clearer somewhat later, and "consolidates" the moral views of the English text. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Minnis, Alastair J. Published Minnis, Alastair J.. "Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets." In The Uses of Manuscripts in Literary Studies: Essays in Memory of Judson Boyce Allen. Ed. Morse, Charlotte Cook and Doob, Penelope Reed and Woods, Majorie Curry. Studies in Medieval Culture (31). Kalamazoo: Western Michgan University, 1992, pp. 161-89. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authors in Love: The Exegesis of Late-Medieval Love-Poets Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michgan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cites recent arguments (promulgated by Peter Nicholson) concerning the role of scribes in the creation of what Macaulay identified as stages of revision in the MSS of CA, in his discussion of the tendency of modern editors to resist or reject theories of authorial revision of Middle English works that were accepted by preceding generations of scholars. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Pearsall, Derek Published Pearsall, Derek. "Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts." In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Ed. Minnis, A. J. and Brewer, Charlotte. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 39-48. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Authorial Revision in Some Late-Medieval English Texts Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Cites as unproblematic examples of both CA and VC in her discussion of the difficulties of editing and of establishing a clear chronology of revision for works that survive in more than a single version. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Hudson, Anne Published Hudson, Anne. "The Variable Text." In Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Ed. Minnis, A. J. and Brewer, Charlotte. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992, pp. 49-60. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Variable Text Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available D. S. Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The cup that Albinus has made of Rosemund's father's skull "was begrave / Of such werk as it scholde have, / And was policed ek so clene / That no signe of the Skulle is sene, / But as it were a Gripes ey" (CA 1.2541-45). Burrow explains the "Gripes ey" as a type of drinking vessel made of a griffin's (actually an ostrich's) egg, citing references from several late medieval wills, and he includes photos of two fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples that clarify Gower's description. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Burrow, John Published Burrow, John. "The Griffin's Egg: Gower's Confessio Amantis I 2545." In Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando. Ed. Takamiya, Toshiyuki and Beadle, Richard. Cambridge: Brewer, 1992, pp. 81-85. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Griffin's Egg: Gower's Confessio Amantis I 2545 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Brewer, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Sanders collocates four texts in his essay: Gower's tale of "Canace and Machaire" from CA 3.143-336, Chaucer's SqT, the episode of Amavia and Mordant from the Faerie Queene, Book 2, and Spenser's adaptation and completion of SqT in FQ Book 4. The entire episode of Amavia, her lover, and her child Rudddymane has a number of parallels with the story of Canace as Ovid depicts it in the Heroides, but as Amavia dies, Ruddymane bathes in the blood flowing from her breast, a detail that Sanders points out Spenser could have found only in Gower's version. In his retelling of the tale, Gower transforms a dramatic monologue into a third-person narrative, but maintains the moral bearings of Ovid's version: "Gower's appropriation of Ovid's pagan text takes advantage of its psychological astuteness to dramatize the medieval view of relations between the mind and nature when the Christian law of temperance and forgiveness was lacking" (p. 201). In his retelling, Spenser eliminates the woman's father (Ovid's Aeolus), and transfers his fury to the woman herself; he also has Guyon rescue the innocent baby, an act of mercy that compensates for Aeolus' wrath. His adaptation of Chaucer is somewhat more complex. Sanders argues that SqT, about a rather different Canace, is also an attempt to rewrite Gower's and Ovid's story: no other tale of Canace is known, and Chaucer's heroine is also provided not with just one brother but with two, raising the potential at least for another lapse into incest. The Squire, having heard Gower's tale misrepresented in MLIntro, anticipates objections to his tale from one of the Man of Law's middle class companions. He carefully provides his Canace with the means to protect herself from the failings of Ovid's and Gower's heroines, and he shifts the theme from youthful innocence to a concern for truthfulness and secrecy, but he is interrupted nonetheless, by the Franklin (in the manuscripts that provide the base for all modern editions) or by the Merchant (in Thynne's editions). Spenser would have sympathized with aristocratic Squire's prerogative to shape the tale in his own way. In FQ 4 he follows the Squire's example by carrying the transformation of the tale even further, by placing Canace in a setting within reach of Christian values. And his resolution of the conflicts of the story emphasizes the tempering of the extremes of love and hate, echoing the rescue of Ruddymane by the figure of Temperance in Book 2. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sanders, Arnold A. Published Sanders, Arnold A.. "Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale." In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allen, David G. and White, Robert A.. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1992, pp. 196-215. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Ruddymane and Canace, Lost and Found: Spenser's Reception of Gower's Confessio Amantis 3 and Chaucer's Squire's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Delaware Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review One of the two routes to instruction that Westrem describes is Gower's: the allegorical frame, the signposts provides by the sins, the tales drawn from the past, the long digressions, the conscious attempt to mix "lust" with "lore." The other is provided by contemporary "travel" literature, such as "Mandeville's Travels" and a similar, slightly later "Itinerarius" attributed to Johannes Witte de Hese of Utrecht. Westrem's real interest is in the second type. Using both the similarities and the contrasts to Gower's "Confessio Amantis," Westrem demonstrates that Mandeville's work also contains a great deal of "lore," presented in a particularly artful and alluring way, in response to the critical view that holds it to be merely a plagiarized fantasy. He gives particular attention to Mandeville's tolerance and respectfulness towards non-Christian religions, his use of pagans to instruct in proper behavior, his creation of a persona, and his deliberate reshaping of his sources. Witte's work is more fanstastical, but proves the growing importance of travel literature as a means of conveying information and instruction by around 1400. The works of this genre, Westrem concludes, provide an important model for later works of satire in the form of fiction such as "Gulliver's Travels." [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 11.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Westrem, Scott D. Published Westrem, Scott D.. "Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature." In The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Ed. Allen, David G. and White, Robert A.. Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware, 1992, pp. 67-80. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Two Routes to Pleasant Instruction in Late-Fourteenth Century Literature Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of Delaware, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This is a shorter version of the essay entitled "Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer," that appeared in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. Robert F. Yeager (1991). [JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Dinshaw, Carolyn Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Published Dinshaw, Carolyn. "Quarrels, Rivals and Rape: Gower and Chaucer." In A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honor of Paule Mertens-Fonck. Ed. Dor, Juliette. Liége: L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, 1992, pp. 112-122. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Quarrels, Rivals and Rape: Gower and Chaucer Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review In the final stanzas of T&C Chaucer brutally shatters the reconciliation between love of God and the love inspired by Nature that had evidently been achieved at the highest moment of the poem in Book 3. Crépin compares Chaucer's "palinode" to CA *8.3088-114, in which Gower too describes a movement from earthly to heavenly love, and he argues that Chaucer is responding to Gower here: that Chaucer "took up the challenge" of Gower's suggestion that Chaucer say farewell to love poetry in CA *8.2941-57 by going further than Gower himself in his radical condemnation of human love. In doing so, he "out-Gowers Gower"; and in his condemnation of "the forme of olde clerkes speche / In poetrie" (T&C 5.1854-55), he also attacks the entire structure of CA as well as material of his own poem. Gower responded in turn in the revised version of CA: he dropped the allusion to Chaucer, and the anaphora of one passage of the rewritten epilogue (CA 8.3165-67) appears to be in imitation of Chaucer's use of the same device in T&C 5.1828ff and 5.1849ff. The comparison of these two works brings out some of the differences between the poets: "Gower contrasts the two kinds of love but does not set them in opposition to one another or suggest that once excludes the other," while Chaucer "makes the opposition complete and allows room for compromise." His more radical position may reflect actual belief, but is also calculated to "tease his readers/listeners, and himself, into thought." Crépin does not suggest dates for the composition of T&C or either of the versions of CA, but his argument requires acceptance of a chronology very different from that which is ordinarily assumed. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Crépin, André Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Published Crépin, André. "Human and Divine Love in Chaucer and Gower." In A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck. Ed. Dor, Juliette. Liége: L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, 1992, pp. 71-79. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Human and Divine Love in Chaucer and Gower Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available L3 – Liége Language and Literature, Département d'anglais, Université de Liége, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review The selections in this extraordinarily useful anthology, all in modern English translation, range chronologically from Aristotle to Christine de Pizan, and are divided into eight chapters, "The Roots of Antifeminist Tradition," "The Church Fathers," "The Legacy of the Church Fathers," "The Satirical Tradition in Medieval Latin," "Antifeminist Tales," "Vernacular Adaptations in the Later Middle Ages," "The Wife of Bath," "Responses to Antifeminism," and "A Woman defends Women." The second to last chapter includes (pp. 248-49) a brief excerpt from CA (7.4239-4307, translated in modern English prose), in which Genius argues, contrary to a long tradition that is manifested elsewhere in the anthology, that the man is to blame rather than the woman when he allows himself to be distracted by her beauty. The headnote to the selection suggests that the emphasis on personal responsibility reflected in this passage provides a main theme for the entire poem. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 12.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. Published Blamires, Alcuin. Karen Pratt, and C. W. Marx, eds. "Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts." Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Clarendon Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Two selections from two manuscripts of the "Confessio Amantis"--Princeton, Princeton University Library, MS Garrett 136, and Washington, D.C., Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.b.29--are used to illustrate, respectively, the difference between an anglicana hand of ca. 1400 and a secretary hand, ca. 1450. Page 10 contains a transcription of the texts, discussion of the hands, and--very briefly--of the manuscripts; page 11 plates show the passages in situ. [RFY. Copyright. The John Gower Society. eJGN 41.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Preston, Jean F., and Laetitia Yeandle. Published Preston, Jean F., and Laetitia Yeandle. English Handwriting 1400-1650: An Introductory Manual (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp.10-11. Gower Subject Manuscripts and Textual Studies Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource English Handwriting 1400-1650: An Introductory Manual. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1992 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Aguirre considers Gower's tale of Florent within his discussion of the relation between the English analogues of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale and Celtic myths of sovereignty from which some scholars believe that these tales derive. Aguirre argues for a closer connection than has been traditionally recognized, and he sees a continuity, with transformation, between the numinous, extra-rational woman who grants territorial sovereignty in the Celtic tales and the fairy-like woman who makes an unreasonable demand for sovereignty in marriage in the later versions. He suggests further transformation of the figure of the woman in SGGK and later literature. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Aguirre, Manuel Published Aguirre, Manuel. "The Riddle of Sovereignty." Modern Language Review 88 (1993), pp. 273-82. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Riddle of Sovereignty Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to Donavin's analysis, incest is not merely the worst example of sexual desire unrestrained by law and reason in CA; it provides the basis for the moral structure of the entire poem, in two aspects. As represented in Venus and Cupid, first of all, it defines the moral failings of all who imitate Venus by serving her in the "court of Love." But as in common medieval interpretations of the Song of Songs and of Mary's relationship with Christ, it is also a figure for the transcendance of passion and for the soul's desire for union with God. During the course of the poem, Amans is brought from his more literal imitation of Venus' incestuous passion to a repudiation of the court of love and to an appreciation of the figurative, redemptive union which Venus and Cupid parody. Genius leads the way for Amans by means of his own deepening understanding of the meaning of incest in the tales in which it appears. These tales appear throughout CA. In "Canace and Machaire," Genius' obfuscation of the real issues in his attempts to excuse Canace and to evoke pity for her reveal the incompleteness of his moral development at this stage of the poem. In citing her lyrical complaint to Machaire, he mistakenly believes that the echoes of the practices of love's court ennoble their incestuous passion; in fact, they reveal the moral degeneration which is the prelude to the social chaos of the tale's conclusion. The tale offers a warning to Amans that his own pursuit of his lady is immoral. Incest is manifested in more sublimated form in the tale of "Orestes," in which the hero's lawless sexual violence against his mother is provoked by the gods and leads to social breakdown in a different form; and in "Constance," in which the two mothers-in-law are led to destructive violence by their jealous incestuous affection for their sons. "Constance" also reflects the redemptive aspect of incest in the heroine's relation with her father, in which incestuous passion is transcended, and which is transformed at the end of the tale into a "figure for the soul's arrival in heaven." The tale of Peronelle and the "Three Questions" also uses the incestuous overtones of the father's relation with his daughter as an allegory for the soul's merging with the divine. Both positive and negative aspects of incest culminate in the final tale of the poem, "Apollonius of Tyre." In Antiochus, literal incest is revealed most clearly to be a form of tyranny, both in the father's rule over his daughter, and more personally, in passion's rule over reason. Apollonius illustrates the conquest of both forms, in his escape from Antiochus and in his control of his feelings for his daughter. The final redemptive moment in the tale, moreover, is his reunion with Thaise, in which the potentially incestuous relation becomes the vehicle for Apollonius' spiritual emancipation. The tale provides the model for Amans' rejection of Venus' tyranny and his turning towards contemplation of God in the poem's conclusion. This summary hardly does justice to Donavin's case, which is presented both earnestly and with considerable subtlety. Her argument in general classes her among those who find that the purpose of the confession is to lead Amans away from his love, and in her allusions, for instance, to Amans' "complicity in incest" and his "overwhelming, ruinous lust" (p. 6), and to his "mental degeneration" (p. 38), we have some of the strongest statements in all of published Gower criticism of the notion that Amans' love for his lady is by its very nature wrong. Others have drawn a connection between the tales of literal incest in the poem; Donavin's most original contribution is to see the non-literal possibilities of the tales in which incest is only implicit. This is precisely, however, where her argument seems most strained. She must labor to prove that some of her examples even belong in a discussion of incest at all. Concerning Constance's first mother-in-law, for example, she writes, trying to compensate for Gower's inexplicitness on the matter: "The mother's motivation for murder is fear that some of the privileges of her 'astat' shall be transferred to Constance. And what shall be the main privilege of Constance's new 'astat' but the advantage of being the Sultan's consort, his sexual partner?" (p. 44); and on the next page, only the analogy of the first mother-in-law provides any explanation of the motivation of the second. Her treatment of Orestes' vengeance on his mother as a subminated act of incest instead of righteous wrath requires even greater distortion. To use Peronelle as a positive example of incest transformed, on the other hand, Donavin must not only read her relationship with her father overly subtly, but she constructs an allegory in which Alphonse, Peronelle's husband, stands in both for Jesus and for sinful mankind. What is missing in her discussion of this tale and those of Constance and Apollonius, and in her restriction to so small a number of tales from so long a poem, is sufficient recognition of the importance Gower gives to virtuous marriage, both as a goal for the lover and as an antidote to sin. For those who feel that the purpose of the confession, until the final scene, is to lead Amans to a more virtuous practice of love rather than to a renunciation of love altogether, neither the pattern that she draws nor her treatment of individual tales will be altogether compelling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1]. Author/Editor Author/Editor Donavin, Georgiana Published Donavin, Georgiana. "Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower's Confessio Amantis." ELS Monograph Series, 56 . Victoria, BC: Englsig Literary Studies, 1993 ISBN 0920604641 Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Incest Narratives and the Structure of Gower's Confessio Amantis Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Englsig Literary Studies, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Peck addresses himself boldly and learnedly to one of the central concerns of recent criticism of CA. He begins by steering his way through modern notions of irony and textuality to settle on a definition that is traditional in implication, but adapted to the structure of the poem: "Irony, as I use the term, concerns itself with authorial intention, voicing, and the positioning of each voice, whether designated (Amans, Genius, Venus) or implied (author, source, ethical commonplace), in relation to the other" (p. 208). According to Wayne Booth, irony may be either "stable" and reconstructable, or "unstable" and indeterminate. The irony in CA appears to be stable, Peck notes; "that is, we have little difficulty determining the larger intention of the poet, for he is careful to explain his purpose in the Prologue and in the first section of Book I. Moreover, he adds Latin epigrams and marginal glosses to guide the reader as the poem progresses, and includes expository materials, especially in Book VII and the conclusion to Book VIII, which reiterate his basic goals" (p. 209). But if it is stable, it is not necessarily simple. In the main body of the poem, Gower creates a dialogue between two "unstable" figures, the comic, besotted Amans, trapped in the self-deception of his willful passion, and his confessor Genius, who doggedly but simplemindedly makes an appeal to Amans' non-existent reason. Amans' errors of judgment and self-perception are relatively easy to detect. Genius poses greater challenges: a "master at reduction" (p. 212), his simplified stories and simpleminded moralizations leave abundant room for, and indeed urgently require the exercise of, the reader's own ingenuity in the search for a stabilized meaning. Peck illustrates his argument with examples from the opening of Book 4, with Amans' first confession and Genius' first exempla on the sin of Sloth. Peck relentlessly problematizes the text, discovering inconsistencies in Amans' self-presentation and unanswered questions arising from individual tales and from their juxtaposition. He reaches forward and backward in the text in his search for the unspoken implications of Genius' lessons; at the same time, he offers a useful and cautious discussion of the dangers of reaching too far outside the text, allowing the traditional judgment of Aeneas contained in the commentaries on Virgil and Ovid to apply where it is consistent with Genius' purpose, arguing against the relevance of similar traditional sources regarding Ulysses, and allowing the traditional medieval interpretation of Pygmalion to enter in in a way that Genius does not intend. Peck's conclusion has as much to do with the complexity of Genius' role as it does with Gower's use of irony: "Genius resides at the crux of must issues of irony in the Confessio. Readings of the poem will usually be just as sound as they are subtle in dealing with the complexities of Genius' role. Too often he gets pigeonholed by one allegorical reading or another. Such placements may yield readings which seem stable if the premises of the commentators are accepted. But they must be seen as partial readings at best (p. 224). These partial readings, he implies, are all relevant, and place all of the burden on the reader to discover Gower's meaning. The irony of the structure of the poem that Peck implies but does not articulate is that such simple lessons should yield such great complexity, yet that from so much complexity Gower's purpose may nevertheless be ascertained. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Peck, Russell A. Published Peck, Russell A.. "The Problematics of Irony in Gower's Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 15 (1993), pp. 207-229. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Problematics of Irony in Gower's Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review According to Roberts, Eliot's lines near the end of Movement I of the "East Coker" section of the Four Quartets, "I am here / or there or elsewhere," may echo CA Prol. 9, "Whan we ben dede and elleswhere;" if so, the allusion to Gower's passage helps clarify Eliot's use of "elsewhere" as a reference to a state beyond death. Roberts admits, though, that there is no way to certain that the evocation of Gower was deliberate. Indeed. He might have added that Eliot might not have needed Gower to suggest such a use for "elsewhere," and that without certainty that that was what Eliot really meant, there is really no evidence that Eliot had Gower in mind at all. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Roberts, F. X. Published Roberts, F. X.. "A Source for T.S. Eliot's Use of 'Elsewhere' in East Coker'." ANQ: American Notes and Queries 6 (1993), pp. 24-25. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource A Source for T.S. Eliot's Use of 'Elsewhere' in East Coker' Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers a new attempt to explain the evident change in Gower's opinion of Richard II that is reflected in his revisions in CA. He focuses on the period 1390-91, the time when Gower revised the epilogue to his poem if the marginal reference to "anno quarto decimo Regis Ricardi" at 8.2973 is correct; and he finds evidence of Richard's growing "absolutism" and of his "quasi-autocratic approach to government" in his struggles with Parliament over their respective authority, in his reappointment to office of men loyal to him who had been dismissed by the Appellants, and in his display of the badge of the White Hart at the Smithfield tournament of October, 1390, in violation of the spirit of the Ordinance of 1390 restricting the use of livery (though this Ordinance specifically excluded the king). He does not explain why Gower, having become so disillusioned with the king, did not remove the dedication to the king in the Prologue until two years later, the "yer sextenthe of kyng Richard" (Prol. 25), the date that most scholars, following Fisher, have cited for Gower's change of feeling. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Stow, George Published Stow, George. ""Richard II in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives."." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 3-31. Gower Subject Biography of Gower Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Richard II in John Gower's Confessio Amantis: Some Historical Perspectives." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Ferster, Judith Published Ferster, Judith. "O Political Gower." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 33-53. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Confessio Amantis Review Takes a sophisticated approach to the questions of Gower's politics and his poetry. Citing the diversity of labels that have been attached to Gower's political views by modern scholars, she points out the difficulties posed by the rapidly shifting political winds of Gower's time, and she also distinguishes between modern attitudes towards absolute monarchy and those of Gower, who lived at a time when monarchy was the only form of government available. She is able nonetheless to find evidence of Gower's judgment of the king -- in which he is subservient, but also to some degree subversive -- in his treatment of the related issues of the king's need for advice and the people's role in government. She chooses most of her examples from Book 7 of CA. The very inclusion of this book in light of contemporary discussion of the behavior of the king must be seen as an attempt to comment on contemporary events, she argues. In the tales she examines, she finds evidence of Gower heightening the contemporary reference and commenting directly on both the king and his counselors. The final source of wise counsel for Gower is evidently the people themselves, not the vulgar mob whom he denounces in the first book of VC, but the vox populi when it speaks as a unified and unanimous voice. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource O Political Gower Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A detailed examination of both Chaucer's and Gower's allusions to stories of King Arthur in an attempt to discover which texts they had read and to define their attitude toward Arthurian romance. Neither poet gives much more than brief allusion to Arthurian figures, and their references seem often to be based on no more than general knowledge of Arthurian tales. Gower, moreover, if he drew his tale of Florent from an Arthurian source, removed all reference to Arthur in his retelling. Kennedy's work of detection is thus all the more impressive. Chaucer was less interested in Arthurian literature than Gower, Kennedy concludes, though he knew Geoffrey of Monmouth, some version of the Tristan story, and either the cyclic or non-cyclic Lancelot en prose. Gower's taste was somewhat more old-fashioned: he knew more about Gawain than Chaucer evidently did; he knew more about Tristan, though it is still not possible to establish which work he drew upon; and in addition to the Lancelot en prose, he seems to have known more of the Vulgate Cycle, including at very least La Mort Le Roi Artu. He also seems to have taken these stories more seriously than Chaucer did. In using them as sources of moral lessons, his attitude toward the characters he mentions is usually disapproving, but he includes Arthur himself among the Nine Worthies, and his preference for a heroic conception of the king, Kennedy suggests, may explain his excision of Arthur from the tale of Florent, in all analogues of which Arthur plays a less than heroic role. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Kennedy, Edward Donald Published Kennedy, Edward Donald. "Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 55-90. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower, Chaucer, and French Prose Arthurian Romance Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review examines CB and CA from the perspective of French medieval love poetry, and finds in both cases that Gower's work is oversimplified when it is viewed merely as a rejection of fin' amor. The French poetry that Gower drew upon itself was more complex, more self-reflexive and self-critical, than such a judgment implies, he argues. But Gower's work too is also rich and complex. Calin offers a brief examination of CB, emphasizing its diversity of theme and its attempt to reconcile fin' amor and marriage, pointing out where Gower adheres to and departs from the conventions of his French predecessors. He also emphasizes the Frenchness of CA, and sees Gower as the "disciple" of Jean de Meun, Machaut, and Froissart, adopting rather than repudiating the "French courtly vision" in his complex, sophisticated and above all humorous way of treating questions of love. Calin gives a lengthy discussion of the comic potential generated by the juxtaposition of the penitential with the erotic, by the use (and misuse) of exempla, and by the contradictions inherent in the figures of Genius and Amans, giving particular attention to the ending of the poem. Like his most important French predecessors and also like his friend Chaucer, he concludes, Gower "emphasizes discrepancies," and creates a "comic masterpiece" which sums up "two centuries of courtly debate on man, woman, and desire" (p. 109). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Calin, William Published Calin, William. "John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 91-111. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Cinkante Balades Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource John Gower's Continuity in the Tradition of French Fin' Amor Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Adopts a sober view of the morality of CA. Following Fisher and Porter, Cooper sees Gower as preoccupied with disorder, both in society and in the individual. One of the major images that he counterposes to disorder in CA is that of balance, particularly as represented in the two pans of the scale which, when equal, are also stable. Gower expresses this concept not only in his specific allusions to weighing and to scales but also rhetorically, in his use of what Cooper calls "parison," the "balancing" of units of similar length and similar syntactic function. Gower's use of the device in CA is far more frequent than in his French or Latin works, perhaps because of the nature of the language, perhaps because of the possibilities afford by the four-stress line and Gower's use of couplets rather than stanzas. But it is also, she asserts, related to the dominant thematic concerns of the poem, and she goes on to provide literally dozens of examples in which Gower uses the device in thematically significant contexts. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Cooper, Helen Published Cooper, Helen. "'Peised Evene in the Balance': A Thematic and Rhetorical Topos in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 113-139. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Peised Evene in the Balance': A Thematic and Rhetorical Topos in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Farnham, Anthony E. Published Farnham, Anthony E.. "Statement and Search in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 13 (1993), pp. 141-158. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Offers a view of the moral structure of the poem. Borrowing his terms from Dorothy Sayers, and invoking a contrast to Dante, he describes Gower's career as a movement from the poetry of statement to that of search, from "positive certainty of moral assertion" to the "attempt to struggle with whatever it is in human experience that denies such knowledge and resists its expression" (p. 142). His example of the poetry of search is, of course, CA. He examines how at the opening of Book 1 a multiplicity of voices -- the marginal commentator, the elegiac verse writer, Amans, Genius, who himself becomes at least two voices, the priest/narrator of the tales and the confessor who comments on them -- replaces the unity of statement of the Prologue, and how the clash of view that results "engages both the poem and its readers in an ever-widening search for active clarity of moral vision" (p. 146). He illustrates the effect with the first three tales of Book 3: he distinguishes five different interpretations of the tale of "Canace and Machaire" within the text itself; and he compares Gower's version of "Phebus and Cornide" to its four best-known predecessors to show how their conflicting moral interpretations are present as part of the background to Genius' telling of the story. This method of comparing different moral perspectives remains consistent throughout CA except in the history of religions section in Book 5, and in Book 7, which "seems to return to poetry of statement partly for the purpose of demonstrating that statement is at this point unable to further the search of the poem" (p. 152). In Book 8, the final tale, of "Apollonius of Tyre," is itself fittingly a story of search, and of "recovery of both love and order in life" (p. 154). Amans himself is not able to imitate Apollonius, and CA is thus a record of his failure, though not a failure itself, a brilliant evocation of "human experience groping blindly toward lasting vision" (p. 155). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Statement and Search in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers the complexity of structure of the CA. Simpson begins with Gower's frequent use of "enformacioun" and the related verb "enforme," which, he suggests, have more than the neutral modern sense, suggesting not just a body of knowledge but also its active effect upon the recipient, senses related to medieval philosophical ideas of "form." Imitating God's "forming" the elements and the soul of man according to a divine exemplar, the instruction in the poem will bring Amans' soul to self-knowledge and to its ideal "form." In Simpson's account, however, the process of instruction is not direct, but proceeds by way of the particular "form" of the poem, in which Genius is one participant in a dialogue among different faculties, representing the imagination or ingenium that mediates between will and reason. As such, he too is in need of "enformacioun," as he grows, during the course of the dialogue, into his proper function. Simpson surveys some familiar material here. He re-examines Genius' ancestry to demonstrate his width of sympathies, from rational to irrational; and he uses Book 3, one of the most problematic for Genius' role, as the source of examples for his analysis. At the beginning of the book, Genius' moral authority is questionable, as he seems to think rather like Pandarus, more interested in success in love than with rational control of sexual appetite. By the end of the book, however, under the prompting of Amans' questions, he moves towards conformity with reason, and shows through his tales "that personal ethics cannot be grounded on natural law alone; instead, the formation of a personal ethics demands a placing of the self within the human constraints which govern relationships in society more broadly. An ethics, that is, demands a politics" (p. 183). This is the central thematic message of the poem, according to Simpson; and the stories in the poem "are not only about the control of the will by reason, but they effect that very control in their listener Amans" (p. 185), as "Gower represents the naturally regenerative powers of the soul interacting with each other, bringing the will back into its proper mediation with, or conformity with the reason" (p. 187). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Simpson, James Published Simpson, James. "Genius's 'Enformacioun' in Book III of the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 159-195. Gower Subject Language and Word Studies Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Genius's 'Enformacioun' in Book III of the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Shoaf, R. A. Published Shoaf, R. A.. "'Tho love made him an hard eschange' and 'With false brocage hath take usure': Narcissus and Echo in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 197-207. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Review Analyzes two of Gower's tales as examples of Gower's typically "determinate" reading -- setting out prescriptively the meaning of the stories he retells from Ovid -- in contrast to the "indeterminate" reading more typical of Chaucer. The way in which Gower has chosen to read Ovid is informed, in Shoaf's account, by Freud. In the key lines that Shoaf cites, Gower reveals his "understanding of the economy of eros and thanatos in the human psyche" (p. 201), mixing classical and Christian notions in order to condemn Narcissus for his presumptuous refusal to give his love and Echo for her avaricious procuration. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'Tho love made him an hard eschange' and 'With false brocage hath take usure': Narcissus and Echo in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concerned with Gower's reading of Ovid. From epistle 11 of Ovid's "Heroides," written by Canace and ending with an allusion to the blood-stained letter in her lap, Gower has extracted a straightforward narrative, replacing ordo artificialis with ordo naturalis. Gower refuses to condemn the children's incest, though he is not unaware of the traditional medieval judgment that their love was unnatural. Instead he chooses to emphasize the "naturalness of the unnatural," in his manner of telling, in his attribution to Canace of a letter echoing the most conventional courtly rhetoric of love, and in the image of the child bathing in his mother's blood with which the tale concludes. This image, though not in Ovid's version, is nonetheless based on Ovid, as the literal child replaces the metaphorical child, Canace's blood-stained letter, as the victim of Eolus' wrath. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Spearing, A. C. Published Spearing, A. C.. "Canace and Machaire." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 211-221. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Canace and Machaire Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Edwards, A. S. G. Published Edwards, A. S. G.. "Gower's Women in the Confessio." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 223-237. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Review Takes issue with the prevailing critical orthodoxy that Gower showed particular compassion for his female characters. Beginning with the four virtuous women of Amans' final vision, and proceeding with a comparison between Gower's and Chaucer's treatment of some of the same figures -- Thisbe, Constance, Lucrece, Virginia, Phyllis, Medea -- he demonstrates that Gower's male characters receive greater attention to their feelings and greater sympathy for their suffering, that the women's feelings tend to be deflected or marginalized, that the women's situation is subordinated to that of the men around them, and that Gower's women in general tend to be defined by the way in which they affect the lives of men. Rather than being hostile to women, Edwards concludes, Gower simply appears to have felt that they were less significant than men. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Women in the Confessio Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This essay is not concerned, as might be expected from the title, either with Gower's lyrics or with Petrarch's, but instead draws a broader comparison between CA as a whole and Petrarch's own definition of his life and career as contained in his "Letter to Posterity." Despite the great differences in form between these two works, Wood asserts that their general aims are the same: the denunciation of the vanity of youthful pleasure, and the diminution of all earthly rewards as compared to heavenly. More specific details reinforce the impression of a common heritage: similar imagery to describe the departure from love, similar addresses to posterity, and similar modesty topoi. Petrarch's letter ends inconclusively, however, while he is still in a restless state of wandering. To account for this and some other differences in CA, Wood turns to Augustine's Confessions, with its case history of the author's own life and its movement from restlessness to rest. Rather than being merely reductive, Wood concludes, the similarities to these two earlier works suggest some of the ways in which Gower tried to create something different and better, following precisely Petrarch's counsel on a poet's use of his sources. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Wood, Chauncey Published Wood, Chauncey. "Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 239-256. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Petrarchanism in the Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Attempts to rescue Gower from a century's worth of comparison of his prosody to Chaucer's by distinguishing two different modes of versification, each with different goals. Gower's, he claims, is a "bookish" prosody, a "rhetoric of writing," meant for reading silently, quickly, and for long periods of time (as confirmed by Gower's own statements at the beginning of the Prologue), "a prosody cunningly adapted for the rapid but pleasant reading of many stories" (p. 260). The "unit of sense" of such a prosody is the verse paragraph, not the individual line; there is little opportunity, therefore, for attention to particular words or particular poetic effects. At the same time, Gower has no reason to adopt the "fictions of voice and the rhythms of speech" that are characteristic of Chaucer and Langland. The examples that Gaylord cites (which he prints free of Macaulay's editorial punctuation) demonstrate how different from speech Gower's prosody is, yet how it produces a forward moving narrative slowed only by deft rhetorical patterning at significant moments. As a more complete demonstration of how their prosody suits their different purposes, he gives a detailed comparison of Gower's tale of Florent to Chaucer's WBT: the first "is handled as a narrative with almost no conversation and no debate, moving unerringly to the demonstration that virtuous gentilesse will bring good fortune in life and love," and the second "is handled as an exemplum whose end has already been telegraphed in the Prologue, and whose every ethical point along the way is problematized, made the occasion for personal digression and argumentative emphasis" (p. 267). He concludes with a briefer discussion of "Apollonius of Tyre," again emphasizing the suitability of the prosody to the type of exemplary narrative that Gower constructs. Gaylord's analysis is based all but exclusively on Gower's tales; what is missing is any distinction between Gower's narrative style and the prosody of the dialogue between Amans and Genius in the frame, portions of which possess some of the qualities that Gaylord denies to CA altogether. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Gaylord, Alan T. Published Gaylord, Alan T.. "'After the Forme of my Writynge': Gower's Bookish Prosody." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 257-288. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 'After the Forme of my Writynge': Gower's Bookish Prosody Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Offers a more detailed description of Caxton's and Berthelette's editions of CA to supplement the accounts of Macaulay and of Pearsall (in Minnis' Responses and Reassessments, 1983). Many of his more valuable comments derive from his familiarity with the printers' other output; he points out, for instance, that Caxton's account of Gower is far less glowing than his remarks on other poets, and that though he placed Gower in a triad with Chaucer and Lydgate, he had evidently been influenced by Lydgate to consider him a lesser luminary. Caxton also made less effort than he could have to discover the facts of Gower's biography, and his edition of CA is printed more carelessly than was his norm. Berthelette's edition is less well known; Blake therefore reprints the complete texts of his dedication to Henry VIII and his address to the reader, and discusses the attitudes towards Gower and towards Caxton that they reveal. For both printers, who did so much to shape Gower's reputation, Blake concludes, Gower remained in the shadow of Chaucer, and was judged more a moralist than a poet. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blake, N. F. Published Blake, N. F.. "Early Printed Editions of Confessio Amantis." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 289-306. Gower Subject Facsimiles, Editions, and Translations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Early Printed Editions of Confessio Amantis Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review A valuable appreciation of MO within the context of the tradition from which it stems. Gower's colophon suggests that the work is best viewed as an example of devotional literature. Gower's choice of language may reflect an attempt to place his work in that tradition, since Anglo-Norman treatises on devotion evidently remained popular until the very end of the century. Within this tradition, MO is also not unusual for its bulk. The composition of vast formal treatises that were devotional rather than didactic in motivation seems to have been a fourteenth-century phenomenon, but there is no exact parallel for the choice of elements one finds in MO. One of the sources that Gower cites in the first part of the poem, the highly popular Meditationes wrongly attributed to St. Bernard, though very different in form, suggests the sense of "meditation" reflected in Speculum Meditantis, one of the Latin titles of Gower's poem, and it provides the rationale for self-exploration and a turning inward as a means of approaching God that provides the basis for the structure of MO. That turning inward occurs most clearly in the last part of the poem, recounting the life of the Virgin and of Christ, many details of which appear to have been borrowed from works in the devotional tradition. This inward shift, Bestul concludes, has parallels in Chaucer's work and elsewhere; and it "seems to articulate what appears to be a growing conviction in the fourteenth century that what was most needful was a private moral reform based upon individual self-examination, a reform which would hinge upon reflection and contemplation both as necessary activities and as sources of contemplation" (p. 323). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Bestul, Thomas H. Published Bestul, Thomas H.. "Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 307-328. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower's Mirour de l'Omme and the Meditative Tradition Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Assesses Vox Clamantis, particularly Gower's depiction of the Peasants' Revolt in the visio of Book 1. The peasants attacked the most learned men in the city and tried to destroy knowledge; they themselves spoke in the voices of beasts; and they overthrew history in their attempt to establish a new social order. The visio which describes them, however, is a most learned poem, written in "ostentatiously bookish" cento, with a strong sense of its own debt to tradition and of the historical antecedents of the events that it describes. These intriguing contrasts in "modes of knowledge" which Galloway sets out become the occasion for him to consider, among other topics, Gower's view of his own role as a man of learning. Gower had every reason to feel personally threatened by the peasants. Unlike some others, however, his professional rank derived not from his position in the church or from his family connections, but simply from his knowledge. In his allegory of the downfall of civic professionals in VC 1.961-70, he defends the professionalization of knowledge in the London of his time. In referring to himself, however, he denies any link to professional or institutional traditions, and he presents the learning that is at the heart of his poetic vocation as conferred upon him, by Sophia or by the "comun vois," even when it is most clearly the product of his own labors with his sources. He also depicts his knowledge as a state of exile, making an unusual if not unique use of imagery drawn from Ovid. The role that he claimed allowed him to address as equals men who were socially far superior to him, such as Archbishop Arundel, to whom he presented a copy of VC. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Galloway, Andrew Published Galloway, Andrew. "Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 329-347. Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Biography of Gower Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower in His Most Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Considers two parallels between Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes and Book 7 of CA: Hoccleve's inclusion of his long, autobiographical prologue to the actual didactic treatise, which Blyth compares to the juxtaposition of Book 7 with the dialogue between Amans and Genius; and Hoccleve's version of the story that Gower told of Lycurgus. His goal is to reveal differences rather than Gower's influence; Hoccleve is less idealistic than Gower, he concludes, and his "ear is often much closer to the ground, closer to the world of daily social and political abuse and deception, than I think Gower's ever is" (p. 358). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Blyth, Charles R. Published Blyth, Charles R.. "Thomas Hoccleve's Other Master." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 349-359. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Thomas Hoccleve's Other Master Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Concerned less with Gower than with Shakespeare. The "Gower" that Shakespeare creates as choral figure and presenter in "Pericles" is tritely moral, reductive, mechanistic, and consistently inadequate to what richness remains to the plot in the play, and in one sense he is a vast misrepresentation both of Gower as author and Gower/Genius the narrator of "Apollonius of Tyre." However, he merely anticipates the stance of some of the characters, including Pericles, before the many enigmas in the play. He also stands in for Shakespeare himself, as the confession of authorial limitations of the playwright who did not fully control the texts of his plays and who could not control the effects of live performance, but also as a claim to "authorial mystification and elevation," the "authorial medium through which eternal truth speaks" (p. 376), despite his own limitations. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Lynch, Stephen J. Published Lynch, Stephen J.. "The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles." Mediaevalia 16 (1993), pp. 361-378. Gower Subject Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Authority of Gower in Shakespeare's Pericles Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Despite their obvious similarities, the vision of the Peasants' Revolt in Book 1 of VC and Chaucer's NPT "have never been compared systematically," Astell claims (p. 53), and she sets out to remedy the deficiency: Gower's dream of domestic animals acting like wild beasts becomes Chaucer's tale of a domestic animal who has a dream of a wild beast; Gower's introductory remarks on the truth of dreams is elaborated, with borrowings from homiletic sources, in Chaunticleer's long speech to Pertelote; both poets refer (directly or obliquely) to Jack Straw, to the fall of Troy, to a widow, to Fortune, and to Friday; and Gower's assertion that all misfortune is due to sin becomes in NPT the doctrine that Fortune favors those who help themselves. Astell's most interesting suggestion concerns the role of the cock in the two poems: a voice of warning in the visio, the cock anticipates the role of preacher and teacher that Gower assumes himself in the remainder of VC. Chaunticleer also recalls his creator, but as poet rather than as preacher. His role is singer rather than priest. He rejects his own prophetic vision and fails to discern the fox; later the fox is able to seize him by flattering his singing. Chaunticleer is able to turn to tables on the fox, however, as Chaucer is on the implications concerning his shortcomings as moral teacher: his tale finally offers a "moralite" on the need for moral alertness and social responsibility that in the end is not all that different from Gower's. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 17.1]. Reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, vol. 264 (Detroit: Gale, 2017), pp. 188-95. Author/Editor Author/Editor Astell, Ann W Published Astell, Ann W. "The Peasants' Revolt: Cock-Crow in Gower and Chaucer." Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 10 (1993), pp. 53-64. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Vox Clamantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Peasants' Revolt: Cock-Crow in Gower and Chaucer. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Article PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "Based on the premise that the early readers of the poem deserve the attention of their modern successors, this thesis presents for the first time a survey of the early ownership of the manuscripts of Gower's "Confessio Amantis," not suggesting that these owners and readers are necessarily one, but seeking to characterize the membership of the poet's possible audience from the text itself. By discussing in separate chapters the evidence of the provenance of the manuscripts containing excerpts of the poem (Chapter I), the documentary evidence for the history of the recorded copies which no longer survive (Chapter II), and, lastly, the evidence of the provenance of those manuscripts containing the complete text, or once containing such a text or a substantial portion of it (Chapter III), this study seeks to establish the differing readership profiles suggested by the three different forms of evidence and thus to make a general point about the interpretation, or rather, the misinterpretation and mishandling to which the evidence for the make-up of the audience(s)of the major Middle English poetic texts has been prone. The most significant findings of the research is the very clear evidence of the importance of Gower's poem to two groups widely separated in date; attention is drawn to the way in which the manuscripts repeatedly make it apparent that at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century, the poet's work had a special place for members of the House of Lancaster, and that, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, fostered and promoted by the King's propaganda purposes, the Confessio occupied a similar place at the court of Henry VIII. The thesis acknowledges, but alo seeks to break the silence of, the evidence as a witness to the kinds of reading accorded to the Confessio by its medieval audience. Thus, where supporting evidence survives, it is always assembled to try to provide a social and literary or other intellectual context for the ownership of he poem by each member of Gower's possible medieval audience identified. Finally, in chapter IV, the concluding chapter, an account of readers' additions to the manuscripts is given from which discontinuous reading pattern are deduced, akin to the processes of reference and selection behind the creation of extracted versions of the poem." [JGN 13.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Harris, Kate Published Harris, Kate. ""Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis."." PhD thesis, University of York, 1993. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Manuscripts and Textual Studies Influence and Later Allusion Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource "Ownership and Readership: Studies in the Provenance of the Manuscripts of Gower's Confessio Amantis." Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Thesis NonPeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review This collection of previously published essays, in a series intended to illustrate the application of "the latest revisions in literary theory" to particular groups of texts, contains two studies already well known to readers of Gower: Anne Middleton's "The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II" (1978), and Robert F. Yeager's "English, Latin, and the Text as 'Other': The Page as Sign in the Work of John Gower" (1987). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 15.1] Author/Editor Author/Editor Trigg, Stephanie, ed. Published Trigg, Stephanie, ed. "Medieval English Poetry." Longman Critical Readers. . London and New York: Longman, 1993 Gower Subject Backgrounds and General Criticism Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Medieval English Poetry. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Longman, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Gower is very much in the background in this excellent survey of Usk's debt to Chaucer for the conception and place of love in his Testament, but Carlson does revive a suggestion (first made by J.A.W. Bennett in his edition of Selections [1968]), that Venus' appeal to Chaucer to make his own "testament of love" (CA *8.2955) may echo the title of Usk's work, which may already have been circulating as Chaucer's, as it did later, at least from the time of Thynne until Skeat finally established its true authorship in 1893. "Gower may have meant to suggest that Chaucer had better do something to rectify the impression of himself that Usk's writing would have fostered" (p.31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Carlson, David R Published Carlson, David R. "Chaucer's Boethius and Thomas Usk's Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition." In The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Ed. Taylor, Robert A. and Leyerle, John. Studies in Medieval Culture (33). Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993, pp. 29-70. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Chaucer's Boethius and Thomas Usk's Testament of Love: Politics and Love in the Chaucerian Tradition Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Eberle considers Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale" and its analogues in Trivet's "Cronicles" and CA as three different versions of a "story of origins," more particularly of the origin of Christian rulership in England. Each of them takes a different stance with regard to the opposition in contemporary political theory between the "ascending" view of authority (by which authority arises from the governed) and the "descending" view (by which authority descends from God through the king), a question that would have been of special interest to Chaucer, who sat as representative of Kent in the Parliament of 1386 in which these two views were set in direct conflict in the openly expressed challenges to the authority of the king. Trivet adopts a "descending" view especially suited to the royal princess for whom he wrote: his Constance is "forthright, self-confident, and empowered by her faith in God to speak out against those who wrongly attempt to force her to submit. . . . If 'all power is of God,' then God can grant power even to a woman, and a women of noble birth, good education, and a strong commitment to the Christian faith can play a founding role in the course of English history" (p. 131). Gower too seems to adopt a strict "descending" view in his Prologue to CA, expressing in his declaration of allegiance to the king a notion of royal authority that must have been completely congenial to Richard II. In his tale, however, he shifts the emphasis from Constance's personal accomplishments to God's grace; thus "he interprets the 'descending' theory in a way that is calculated to emphasize not the ruler's absolute authority over those beneath him but his absolute dependence on and duty of obedience to the God who is above him as the source of his power" (p. 132). Chaucer's version is more complex. He repeatedly calls attention to human inability to understand God's plan, and emphasizes the suffering that can inexplicably befall individuals in the fulfillment of the greater good. Not only is Custance's preservation attributed to God, but so too are her trials. The arbitrariness and incomprehensibility of Providence raise serious questions about the "descending" view of authority that the tale ostensibly endorses. In another distinctive aspect of Chaucer's version, moreover, Custance's suffering is repeatedly attributed to a confusion between God's will and that of a human ruler: her "submission to the authority of God is what preserves her from death at various points in the story, but her suffering originates in her unquestioning submission to secular authority, beginning with the authority of her father the emperor" (p. 139). The Man of Law's actual preference for an "ascending" view is made more explicit in the Prologue to his tale, where he responds to the Host's claims of authority over the pilgrims with a reminder (echoing Bracton) that "laws bind the lawgiver," asserting "the ongoing legal authority of his own power of assent" (p. 146) in a fashion quite unlike that of the long-suffering Custance. The conflict between these two views of authority, Eberle concludes, occurs throughout CT, and offers a way of discovering previously unappreciated interconnections among a number of important tales. [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 14.2] Author/Editor Author/Editor Eberle, Patricia J. Published Eberle, Patricia J.. "The Question of Authority and The Man of Law's Tale." In The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Ed. Taylor, Robert A. and Leyerle, John. Studies in Medieval Culture (33). Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993, pp. 111-49. Gower Subject Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations Confessio Amantis Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Question of Authority and The Man of Law's Tale Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Western Michigan University, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book Section PeerReviewed Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review Expands upon Ernst Curtius's topos of the "mundus inversus," aided by Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of the carnivalesque and textual dialogism, to explore the how "modulating inversions" result in "playful multiplicity" in "medieval texts drawn from various European traditions," often generated through "irony, antithesis and paradox" (from Sabadash's abstract), and here assessed in fifteenth-century German carnival plays; the "Narrenliteratur" (primarily Sebastian Brant); the twelfth-century Latin "Ysengrimus"; the Old French "Roman de Renard"; Wittenwiler's fifteenth-century German "Ring"; Gower's "Confessio Amantis" and Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Sabadash's discussion of Gower (pp. 141-71) passes quickly over VC as an apocalyptic "vision of universal disorder" (142), while she identifies in more detail a variety of themes and structural techniques of inversion, duplicity, and disorder in CA. Despite earlier critics' efforts to find unity in a movement from courtly to Christian love in the poem, the "teasing incongruities" of CA, Sabadash tells us, "playfully upset all attempts to establish a coherent meaning"; "its multifarious tales ultimately fail to offer a consistent morality and offer instead, like the 'Roman de la Rose,' a complex mirror in which is reflected the many faces of love" (162). To close her discussion, she explores the ambiguities and ambivalences of the character of Genius in both CA and VC, concluding that the CA "demonstrates the capacity of the 'upside-down' topos to invert and interrogate itself." [MA] Author/Editor Author/Editor Sabadash, Deborah Margaret. Published Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Toronto, 1993. Dissertation Abstracts International 55 (1994): 561A. Full-text accessible at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses; accessed February 3, 2023. Gower Subject Confessio Amantis Vox Clamantis Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Worlds Upside-down: Inversive Structures in Late Medieval Literature. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Review "This study concentrates on the major works of Robert Mannyng and John Gower and, without making any specific links between the two writers, investigates some of the devices used to make their long poems cohere . . . . The Introduction examines some forms of manuscript layout used to analyse and represent the constituent parts of an argument or narrative: the 'arbor' and its branches, the 'species' or genealogy, and the use of marginal commentary to modify or interpret a text . . . . Chapter Two demonstrates the flexibility of the manual form, with reference to 'Handlyng Synne . . . , elaborated upon with regard to the 'Confessio Amantis,' and Gower is shown to display a nascent sense of individuality fostered by penitential practice to focus his morality upon the conscience of his reader. The next three chapters deal with the 'Mirour de l'Omme' and 'Vox Clamantis' and their contexts. Society, in the form of the estates, and morality, the Virtues and Vices and 'species' thereof, supply the structural models for much of these works. The final chapter examines the proliferation of prophecies at the time of Gower's 'Cronica Tripertita,' and suggests that he used these as models to create a justification of Bolingbroke's rise to the throne." Author/Editor Author/Editor Higgins, Richard Ian. Published Higgins, Richard Ian. "Narrative Models: The Structure of the Major Works of Robert Mannyng and John Gower." Ph.D. Dissertation. Brunel University, 1993. Index to Theses, with Abstracts: Accepted for Higher Degrees by the Universities of Great Britain and Ireland 43.3 (1994), no. 5257. Gower Subject Style, Rhetoric, and Versification Confessio Amantis Mirour de l'Omme (Speculum Meditantis) Vox Clamantis Chronica Tripertita Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Narrative Models: The Structure of the Major Works of Robert Mannyng and John Gower. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1993 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Gower Collection GowerType Customized Item type for items in the Gower Database Author/Editor Author/Editor Justice, Steven. Published Justice, Stephen. "Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381." Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994 Gower Subject Vox Clamantis Review Justice includes a very brief discussion of Gower's allegorical vision of the Peasants' Revolt in Book 1 of VC in this subtle and often fascinating study of the ways in which the rebellion was represented in the writings both of its participants and of those who either were or sympathized with its victims. Gower, of course, figures among the latter. Having appropriated for himself the voice of the "people" in composing what are now Books 2-7 of VC, Gower faced a popular uprising that both undermined his claim and threatened to absorb him. In order to protect both his project as poet and his carefully constructed political stance, he added the visio in Book 1, which is most notable for its submersion of the voice of the rebels in the braying and bellowing of the animals into which Gower imagines them transformed. "The rising forced Gower anxiously to disassociate his 'voice crying out' from the voices that cried out in June; by declaring himself a proxy for all those the rebels attacked and by prefacing the rest of the poem with his experience of rebel violence, he was able to assert that he did indeed speak in the common voice -- of its victims" (p. 213). Justice interprets Chaucer's only reference to the rising as an even more artful evasion. Elaborating on a suggestion first made by Ian Bishop, he reads the chase scene in NPT as a direct parody of the visio in VC, accessible, however, only to the small group of readers in the poets' immediate circle who would recognize the subtlest taunting at Gower's expense. Chaucer's only direct engagement with the revolt thus shows him "dispelling and forgetting its threat in the minutely textual encoding of a coterie joke" (pp. 230-31). [PN. Copyright The John Gower Society. JGN 16.1] Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available University of California Press, Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1994 Type The nature or genre of the resource Book PeerReviewed